Twilight Zone-ish moralistic fantasy about two modern teens who are transported into the black-and-white world of a Fifties sitcom, and who succeed bit by bit, against stout resistance, in colorizing it. Let's overlook the current cultural parochialism that equates black-and-white with the dull, the drab, the stunted, the repressed, the lifeless, the barren, while color signals the bold, the free, the daring, the rounded, the vivid, the vital. We must allow writer-director Gary Ross to lay down his own rules and set up his own symbols (though the contagion of color in Pleasantville, how and why it spreads through the community, remains a bit capricious); and the flowering of color in a colorless world seems a fair enough metaphor for the tapping of inner potential, the capacity for growth, the ability to change; and the intermixing of color and black-and-white in the same image, sometimes on the same face, is a technological marvel. In a movie, however, that purports to champion diversity, free expression, art, and the like, and to condemn narrowness, prejudice, censorship, and the like, it is hard to view the final and total extermination of black-and-white as any kind of unqualified triumph. Repression is repression, and the signs posted in store windows by the alarmed citizens of Pleasantville -- "No coloreds allowed" -- would not go down better if rewritten as "No blacks or whites." The movie is never, even at its innocuous outset, all that clever and sparkly; and the positing of a Middle American utopia in which there are no problems whatsoever -- in which, as an example, the local basketball team never loses a game nor misses a shot -- suggests an unfamiliarity with actual sitcoms of the Fifties. Ross's conception, from the first beady gleam in his eye, is strictly hypothetical and rigidly schematic, and the eventual harvest of his absence of humor is an abundance of preachiness, self-righteousness, smugness. Color it Piousville. With Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Jeff Daniels, J.T. Walsh. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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