Pleasantville is a gentle yet pointed parable about America's preoccupation with the nostalgic idealisation of an earlier, more innocent time when men were men and women were doormats. When children were seen (through rose coloured glasses) but their music was never heard. When people of colour knew their place, and it wasn't on the airwaves.
Tobey Maguire, who was so good in The Ice Storm, plays David, a teenager from a broken home who dreams of being in a better place. That place is idealised in his favourite television show, a weird melange of every white-bread television show of the 50's and 60's, including Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet.
When television repairman Don Knotts (echoes of Mayberry RFD?) gives David an oddly shaped remote control to replace the one he and his equally troubled twin sister Jennifer broke, David and Jennifer soon find themselves plopped down smack in the middle of Pleasantville, with themselves cast as the teenage leads in David's favourite show.
The acting in this film--particularly Maguire, Allen and Daniels (whom I don't generally find very appealing)--is terrific, but the show belongs to Gary Ross, who wrote two of the better comedies of the recent past, Big and Dave. Ross wrote and directed Pleasantville with the same charm he brought to these previous hits, but here he adds some scenes of social commentary that give this film an edge the others lacked.
Unfortunately, the harder Ross tries to convey his message near the end of the film, the more pedantic and less successful the film becomes. Pleasantville's last 15 minutes get bogged down in making the implicit message explicit, robbing the film of some of it's magic. It would have been a stronger film if Ross had trusted that his audience could read between the lines of his fine script.
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