Pleasantville Review: Magic in the Making
	Jeff Daniels runs his business day after day in Pleasantville.

In Pleasantville, the sun shines every day and nobody misses a basketball shot. Husbands come home to their loving housewives each day, people are never late to work; Life is perfect and everything is in black-and-white. Of course if you've seen the previews, you know that Pleasantville is the setting of a fictional 50s TV sitcom of the same name.

David (Tobey Maguire) and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) live lives opposite of those in David's favorite black-and-white TV sitcom. David is reclusive, a total Pleasantville fanatic. Jennifer on the other hand is the typical "teenage slut," wearing skimpy clothing and dating everything that moves while the siblings' divorced parents dispute custody over the phone.

After an accident involving a scuffle between David and Jennifer and a broken TV remote control, a friendly (dare I say -- "Magical") TV repairman, played by the aging Don Knotts, shows up conveniently at their doorstep. He gives them a new remote that sends them through their TV set, into Pleasantville.

After running amuck throughout the negligent town, David and Jennifer, now named Bud and Mary-Sue, begin to cause drastic changes in the town's atmosphere. They introduce new things like fire (Pleasantville's current fire protection program is in place to take cats out of trees), rain, and sex. After some time, the townspeople begin to become corrupt themselves, indicated by a change from black-and-white to color. Soon a town civil war errupts between the pasty townsfolk and the "colored." Riots explode in the streets shortly before Pleasantville's first ever criminal trial is carried out.

The discrepancies between the whites and the colored bring you back to "To Kill a Mockingbird," where the monochrome tone is still existent and the people are separated by a balcony during the trial. The film's symbolism is quite blatant, there is a particular pointless reference to the Garden of Eden, as well as the color changes in the people. The visual effects are also quite stimulating, the contrast between the black-and-white world and the richly colored objects or vice-versa is like nothing I have ever seen.

Accompanied by a strong cast of Jeff Daniels, the malt shop owner who is the first commoner to dare to be different, mother and father William H. Macy (Fargo) and Joan Allen, as well as the late J.T. Walsh (A Few Good Men) in his final role as the conservative mayor who tries to save his precious town from chaos, "Pleasantville" is backed with great acting to go along with the mystifying story. Writer/director Gary Ross is no stranger to the realm of magic in the movies himself; he was the screenwriter for both "Big," where the young boy is put in the adult's shoes, and "Dave," where the average man is put into the presidential shoes.

-Ethan Kaplan
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10/25/98

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