Pleasantville (film)

Pleasantville is a 1998 American teen fantasy comedy-drama film written, co-produced, and directed by Gary Ross (in his directorial debut). It stars Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, J. T. Walsh, and Reese Witherspoon, with Don Knotts, Paul Walker, Marley Shelton, and Jane Kaczmarek in supporting roles. The story centers on two siblings who wind up trapped in a 1950s TV show, set in a small Midwest town, where residents are seemingly perfect.
The film was one of J. T. Walsh's final performances and was dedicated to his memory. It was also the final on-screen film appearance of Don Knotts, who would subsequently take on voice acting roles until his death.
In 1998, while their mother is away, high school-aged twin siblings David and Jennifer fight over the television, breaking the remote control. A mysterious TV repairman suddenly arrives and, impressed by David's knowledge and love of Pleasantville, a black-and-white 1950s sitcom about the idyllic Parker family, gives him an unusual remote control before departing. When they use it, David and Jennifer are magically transported into the Parkers' house, in Pleasantville's black-and-white world. Unaware of the replacements, George and Betty Parker believe David and Jennifer to be their children Bud and Mary Sue, respectively. Communicating through the Parkers' television, David tries to reason with the repairman, who is offended that they want to come home, thinking they should be lucky to live in Pleasantville.
There, fire is impossible to start (firefighters merely rescue cats from trees), and everyone is unaware that anything exists outside of Pleasantville, as all roads circle back into it. David tells Jennifer they must play the show's characters and not disrupt Pleasantville, but she rebelliously goes on a date with Mary Sue's boyfriend, Skip Martin, the most popular boy in school. She has sex with Skip, who is shocked by the experience, which leads to the first bursts of color appearing in town.
Bill Johnson, owner of the malt shop where Bud works, experiences an existential crisis after realizing the repetitive nature of his life. David tries to help him break out of his routine and notices an attraction between Bill and Betty.
As Jennifer influences other teenagers, parts of Pleasantville become colorized, including some of the residents. Books in the library, previously blank, begin to fill with words after David and Jennifer summarize the plot to their classmates. When Jennifer gives a curious Betty an explanation about sex and tells her how to masturbate, Betty has an orgasm that results in her colorization and a fire in a tree outside.
Other foreign concepts, such as rain, begin to appear. David shows Bill a book of modern art, which inspires him to begin painting and to pursue a romance with Betty. Jennifer loses interest in sex and partying and becomes colorized after finding passion in literature. David pursues a romance with Margaret but is confused and disappointed to find he is still black and white.
Betty leaves George to be with Bill, bewildering him. The town leaders, including the mayor, Big Bob, and others who remain black and white are suspicious of all of these changes and begin to discriminate against the "colored" people, considering them a threat to Pleasantville's values.
A riot is ignited by Bill's nude painting of Betty on the window of his malt shop. The shop is destroyed, books are burned and colored people are harassed in the street. David defends Betty from a gang of teenage boys. Punching one of them, David scares the rest away, demonstrating newfound courage that turns him colored.
The town council establishes a code of conduct that, among other things, bans colored citizens from public venues, closes Lover's Lane, and outlaws reading, rock music and using colorful paint. In protest, David and Bill paint a colorful mural outside the soda fountain depicting the beauty of love, sex, rain, music and literature. They are arrested and brought to trial in front of the entire town. David confronts George about losing Betty, persuading him to tearfully admit he does not just miss the cooking and the cleaning. George becomes colorized along with the rest of the town, except for Big Bob, who refuses to change his ways. After David drives him into a rage by suggesting that one day women may end up going to work while men stay home to cook and clean, Big Bob finally turns colorful before fleeing in shame.
The town celebrates their victory, and color televisions start being sold. They broadcast new programs and footage of other countries. The town's roads also start leading to other cities. With Pleasantville changed, Jennifer chooses to continue her new life in the TV world. Bidding farewell to her, Margaret and Betty, David uses the remote control to return to the real world, where only an hour has passed since his disappearance. He comforts his mother, who had left to meet a man only to get cold feet, and assures her that nothing has to be perfect. In Pleasantville, citizens enjoy their lives, and Jennifer attends college.
This was the first time that a new feature film was created by scanning and digitizing recorded film footage for the purpose of removing or manipulating colors. The black-and-white-meets-color world portrayed in the movie was filmed entirely in color; in all, approximately 163,000 frames of 35 mm footage were scanned, in order to selectively desaturate and adjust contrast digitally. The scanning was done in Los Angeles by Cinesite, utilizing a Spirit DataCine for scanning at 2K resolution and a MegaDef Colour Correction System from Pandora International. Principal photography took place from March 1 to July 2, 1997.
The death of camera operator Brent Hershman, who fell asleep driving home after a 19-hour workday on the set of the film, resulted in a wrongful death suit, claiming that New Line Cinema, New Line Productions and Juno Pix Inc. were responsible for the death as a result of the lengthy work hours imposed on the set. In response to Hershman's death, crew members launched a petition for 'Brent’s Rule', which would limit workdays to a maximum of 14 hours; the petition was ultimately unsuccessful.
The film is dedicated to Hershman, as well as to director Ross's mother, Gail, and actor J. T. Walsh, who also died before the film's release.
Shortly before and during the film's release, an online contest was held to visit the real Pleasantville, Iowa. Over 30,000 people entered. The winner, who remained anonymous, declined the trip and opted to receive the $10,000 cash prize instead.
Director Gary Ross stated, "This movie is about the fact that personal repression gives rise to larger political oppression...That when we're afraid of certain things in ourselves or we're afraid of change, we project those fears on to other things, and a lot of very ugly social situations can develop."
Robert Beuka says in his book SuburbiaNation, "Pleasantville is a morality tale concerning the values of contemporary suburban America by holding that social landscape up against both the Utopian and the dystopian visions of suburbia that emerged in the 1950s."
Robert McDaniel of Film & History described the town as the perfect place, "It never rains, the highs and lows rest at 72 degrees, the fire department exists only to rescue treed cats, and the basketball team never misses the hoop." However, McDaniel says, "Pleasantville is a false hope. David's journey tells him only that there is no 'right' life, no model for how things are 'supposed to be'."
Warren Epstein of The Gazette wrote, "This use of color as a metaphor in black-and-white films certainly has a rich tradition, from the over-the-rainbow land in The Wizard of Oz to the girl in the red dress who made the Holocaust real for Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List. In Pleasantville, color represents the transformation from repression to enlightenment. People—and their surroundings—change from black-and-white to color when they connect with the essence of who they really are."
Pleasantville earned $8.9 million during its opening weekend. It would ultimately earn a total of $40.8 million against a $60 million budget making it a box office flop, despite the critical success.
Pleasantville received positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an 86% rating from 97 reviews, an average rating of 7.7/10, with the critical consensus: "Filled with lighthearted humor, timely social commentary, and dazzling visuals, Pleasantville is an artful blend of subversive satire and well-executed Hollywood formula." Metacritic assigned a score of 71 based on 32 reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four, calling it "one of the best and most original films of the year". Janet Maslin wrote that its "ingenious fantasy" has "seriously belabored its once-gentle metaphor and light comic spirit". Peter M. Nichols, judging the film for its child-viewing worthiness, jokingly wrote in The New York Times that the town of Pleasantville "makes Father Knows Best look like Dallas". Joe Leydon of Variety called it "a provocative, complex and surprisingly anti-nostalgic parable wrapped in the beguiling guise of a commercial high-concept comedy". He commented that some storytelling problems emerge late in the film, but wrote that "Ross is to be commended for refusing to take the easy way out".
Entertainment Weekly wrote a mixed review: "Pleasantville is ultramodern and beautiful. But technical elegance and fine performances mask the shallowness of a story as simpleminded as the '50s TV to which it condescends; certainly it's got none of the depth, poignance, and brilliance of The Truman Show, the recent TV-is-stifling drama that immediately comes to mind." Dave Rettig of Christian Answers said: "On a surface level, the message of the film appears to be 'morality is black and white and pleasant, but sin is color and better,' because often through the film the Pleasantvillians become color after sin (adultery, premarital sex, physical assault, etc...). In one scene in particular, a young woman shows a brightly colored apple to young (and not yet colored) David, encouraging him to take and eat it. Very reminiscent of the Genesis's account of the fall of man."
Time Out New York reviewer Andrew Johnston observed, "Pleasantville doesn't have the consistent internal logic that great fantasies require, and Ross just can't resist spelling everything out for the dim bulbs in the audience. That's a real drag, because the film's fundamental premise—crossing America's nostalgia fixation with Pirandello and the Oz/Narnia/Wonderland archetype—is so damn cool, the film really should have been a masterpiece."
Jesse Walker, writing a retrospective in the January 2010 issue of Reason, argued that the film was misunderstood as a tale of kids from the 1990s bringing life into the conformist world of the 1950s. Walker points out that the supposedly outside influences changing the town of Pleasantville—the civil rights movement, J. D. Salinger, modern art, premarital sex, cool jazz and rockabilly—were all present in the 1950s. Pleasantville "contrasts the faux '50s of our TV-fueled nostalgia with the social ferment that was actually taking place while those sanitized shows first aired".
Filmmaker Jon M. Chu cited the film, alongside The Truman Show (also released in 1998), as an influence on how the Land of Oz is thematically portrayed in the two-part film adaptation of the musical Wicked (2024-2025), saying "It helps create this idea of the rebelliousness that this new younger generation are discovering ... How far will that take everybody in Oz throughout the course of the whole story of both movies? It's an awakening of a generation. You start to see the truth about things that maybe you were taught differently."
The soundtrack features music from the 1950s and 1960s such as "Be-Bop-A-Lula" by Gene Vincent, "Take Five" by The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "So What" by Miles Davis and "At Last" by Etta James. The main score was composed by Randy Newman; he received an Oscar nomination in the original music category. A score release is also in distribution, although the suite track is only available on the standard soundtrack. Among the Pleasantville DVD "Special Features" is a music-only feature with commentary by Randy Newman.
The music video for Fiona Apple's version of "Across the Universe", directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, uses the set of the diner from the film. AllMusic rated the album two-and-a-half stars out of five.