She can't stand the suburban Disneyland that her brother has landed her in, despises its Rotary Club boosterism, its church-social niceness. With her face set hard and mean, like a pint-size Lauren Bacall, Witherspoon gives the movie a jolt of surly contempt that keeps it going through the clumsy and sluggish scenes establishing the premise. When the captain of the basketball team takes Witherspoon to Lovers' Lane, he's hoping, maybe, to hold her hand. They get wind that Maguire and Witherspoon are from somewhere else and start questioning them about the world outside Pleasantville. Suddenly, books that existed only as mysterious names garnishing the spines of bound blank pages begin filling up with text as Maguire tells the story of each.
Reading becomes the new fad among teenagers.
These include William H. Macy as Allen's husband, a man deeply suspicious of what his wife has become, and the late J.T. Walsh as the mayor whose determination to restore conformist decency reveals a fascist streak. Ross' use of music is frequently wonderful. Ross understands that sex and music and books are all things that question society's assumptions. They're all catalysts here. Ross wants the smooth unruffled surface of '50s sitcoms to stand for America's fantasy image of itself during that decade, a place that had banished even the admission that real life contained dirt and messy complications.