Film
Pleasantville
- Director
- Gary Ross
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 124 mins
This near-perfect populist fantasy movie uses good old fashioned story telling skills and state-of-the-art visual effects to create a totally consistent fictional world. Yet its sharp insights are grounded in a familiar reality, albeit one that exists only in the stylised form of a 1950s TV show about a small town suburban utopia where two-dimensional people live perfectly monochrome lives.
Sucked through their TV screen into the fictional world of Pleasantville, wide-eyed teenager Tobey Maguire and his cynical, boy-crazy sister Reese Witherspoon are forced to adopt the personae of the show’s two wholesome teenage kids, joining their hard-working, ever-smiling father, William H. Macy, and his highly domesticated wife, Joan Allen. But the interlopers’ mere presence upsets the town’s comfortable routines: a single rose bursts into Technicolor red and grey complexions slowly give way to natural flesh-tones, prompting a fundamentalist backlash. This sort of emotionally involving, thought-provoking entertainment only rarely surfaces in Hollywood.
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