Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Tobey Maguire
Reese Whiterspoon
William H. Macy
Jeff Daniels
Directed By:
Gary Ross
I watched Pleasantville on the plane, on my way to Buenos Aires. 36 000 feet in the air, with a limited choice of movies, you don't watch what you usually do. I picked Pleasantville out of thirty something movies because it looked visually appealing and I had tiptoed around it for more than ten years. With nowhere else to go, time came for me to face this nagging, recurring temptation to watch it. Boy, I do regret my decision. I could've spend a cozy two hours watching Dirty Harry for the nineteenth time instead of watching this miserable excuse for metafiction.
Pleasantville chokes on clichés from the dead start. Young David (Maguire) is a high school social recluse with a unhealthy addiction to a black and white 60's show called Pleasantville, where nothing ever seems to happen and people always look happy. Over there, firemen are experts in rescuing cats from trees. His sister Jen (Whiterspoon) is a cheerleader type with an important date with a Corey Feldman wannabe. On the evening of a Pleasantville marathon, David and Jen argue about the remote and end up breaking it. Instead of the date, a mysterious t.v repairman rings and gives them a new, strange looking remote. David and Jen resume fighting over it and POOF! They get teleported in Plesantville where they star as characters on the show.
So the show becomes real life to them. Actors become real people around them. David is pleased, but Jennifer isn't. She rebels against the idea of being in that weird unhealthy show and starts importing values from the nineties in the straight, well-ordered way of life of a sixties television show. Then, colors start arriving in their world, like the incarnation of life and passion itself. But poor Pleasantville people aren't ready emotionally for intense emotions, so displays of violence pop over the city with the same speed than color. Yep, like Cuba taken over by Castro & Guevara. *sigh*
What I get from Pleasantville is this: People in the sixties were bland, boring and limited and the nineties are a lot better, more alive. But people in the sixties had to be bland in order to get us liberated. You can't change history. Aside from his baffling judgment on it's own past (I have yet to decide if I have to understand it as televisual past or not), it's a movie that refuses to take sides and so wasted my time. This is exactly how to write a forgettable story. Take a side, backup in the middle of the story and take the other side, but not too much. In the end, audiences are confused and move on to the next movie.
Pleasantville's way of presenting it's own past is quite irritating. Part of it resides in the fact that it's a TV show and writers will always have the easy excuse "but it's a television show, it's not the real past" to defend themselves. The movies rules out a whole generation of breakthrough artists that gradually brought storytelling where it is today. More diverse, of course, but is television really better? It constantly compares real life and sixties television which is unfair to begin with. One one side you have a representation of life, guided by strict moral code and on the other you have life, unrestrained by any guidelines. Both clash and the rigid character end up looking like uprising peasants.
My main problem is that you can't argue Pleasantville. Because it's in itself a movie that you have to filter through your own moral code. So it's a television show, inside a movie, subjective to your judgement. You can argue that David and Jenn are two characters only different and that exposes the dangers of time travel. Yay! It's only a movie, so you don't have to think about anything and quickly hop to the next one. No. If I don't want to think I will watch Rambo and see things explode for two hours. Pleasantville is insidious entertainment, made to kill critical thinking. It's not even a good story or a visually stunning one (it does nothing that was previously done). It's a waste of time and energy. Don't bother.
SCORE: 5%
