Review of Pleasantville (1998) by Nateed — 13 Aug 2021

Pleasantville is a very solid film with lots to like about it including the unique concept. However, the overall story does get a little lost near the third act of the film. The way people turned from black and white to color was a neat idea and I liked a lot of themes they used.

Were the themes executed well? No, not really. I get the filmmakers were trying to make this film stand out from other films by combining all these themes into one big plot, but they all just get lost in the end.

There are so many ways people can turn into color that it makes the rules of the world seem unfocused. While the themes were great, a lot of them felt off in a way. For example, the use of "colored" people was probably not the best choice when it came to describing the people that turned into color.

Plus with the rules of how people were turned into color made the theme of acceptance feel very muddled and not as impactful in the end. Reese Witherspoon's character, Jennifer, was also poorly handled.

It was nice to see the theme of education and innocence shown with her character, but it felt so spotty throughout the film that her final choices didn't make sense entirely. The ending of the film as a whole was kind of off as it didn't feel like the rules of how both worlds impacted each other made sense.

Despite the muddled story, the cast was spectacular. Reese Witherspoon was so good and really sold her character despite the flawed aspects to Jennifer. Joan Allen was also another stand-out in the cast.

Allen portrayed the sitcom housewife perfectly and then continued to amaze me as she switched to a more dynamic character once her original persona was altered. Tobey Maguire was solid, but definitely not his best performance.

Jeff Daniels did a nice job and he made his character very interesting on the surface while also making his inner emotions very deep. William H. Macy was also pretty good, but, like Maguire, this was definitely not his best performance.

Something I really liked about this film was how stunning it looked. The art direction in this film was absolutely amazing. The color and black and white meshing together were just so visually pleasing to look at.

The set design was also very nicely done with Pleasantville offering a combination of both simplistic and striking design. Something that was a bit off to me was the score. Randy Newman usually does a good job, but this score didn't feel cohesive with similar sounds.

Overall, Pleasantville is a film that suffers from muddled storytelling, yet still has a solid cast and striking visual aspects. If only the writing had been much better, this film could have been something amazing.

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