Review of Pleasantville (1998) by Jake R — 13 Mar 2009

Starting with 'Austin Powers' there was a fad in the late Nineties for films to combine the codes and ethics of two different time periods for, presumably, 'hilarious' results. With other things like 'Blast From the Past', 'Pleasantville' goes down the same route of seeing what comic situations could be made out of two completely different ways of life.

However, unlike 'Austin Powers' which goes for out-and-out comedy, 'Pleasantville' tries a far more straight faced appraoch, with resulting lack of basic laughs.

Perhaps the main problem is there is not enough backstory to this fictional TV programme, as audiences outside the US will have little memory of such cliche '50s TV shows like 'I Love Lucy', and it's hard to conjure up a whole roster of rules and conventions for a show just from a stereotypically cheesy title. As such it's hard to find laughs in amongst the efforts of the characters to slowly break down the fourth wall.

A good backstory could've helped the central pair too. We get little information about them accept one's a common clut and the other's a common geek. They do little outside what we would normally expect them to do, and we've seen this kind of thing before.....

'Back to the Future' is credited with starting the whole time-travel craze, way back in 1985, but whereas that film had intelligence and excitement in every department, subsequent efforts seem to find difficulty in combining the two. 'Pleasantville' shares its tone and pacing with Coppola's good-natured failure 'Peggy Sue Got Married', in that both films try to explore a more emotional journey through the past; both inevitably suffer from the same problem: verisimilitude.

Both films attempt to make their characters as likeable but as different from Marty McFly as possible, which really means giving them a high sex drive. There's an uncomfortably large focus on sex in 'Pleasantville' that trivialises the attitude of the '50s in its suggestion that all that decade needed was a good epidemic of teenage humping to become cool. It just doesn't seem to fit, and is typically modern in thinking subtlety and wit, 'Back to the Future's key ingredients, are better replaced with broad strokes petulance.

There's another awkward angle on the whole 'racism' thing at work here. Simultaneously being obvious in its references and simplistic in its conclusion, it might have been better helped were there any black people in the film at all. There may not have been many black characters on '50s TV, but then why go through all the trouble trying to parallel racism in the first place?

For all intents and purposes this film is a real mess of moral and social agendas. If it succeeds in anything it's in its cinematography. Beautifully soft black and white gives way to lush, vibrant colours, and for once at least the visual period detail is right. It's a marvel how good it looks and how it's put to creative uses and complex combinations.

But sumptuous visuals can far from mask the rest of the film's awkwardness. It's not that 'Pleasantville' is a bad film, it just has so many deficiencies that needed serious addressing through a good few redrafts of the screenplay. A disappointing opportunity.