In Pleasantville everything is black and white...both literally and figuratively. Unfortunately, I'm speaking of the movie itself now and not the mythical fifties TV land of that name depicted therein...

Don't get me wrong. This is, in one sense, very refreshing. Unembarrassed, starry-eyed ideology has been sadly absent from the screen in recent years; since 1985's unforgettable Red Dawn perhaps. So when something like Pleasantville comes along -- in such bold contrast to tortured, sophistical fare like Wag the Dog and Primary Colors -- the candid sermonizing seems as fresh and entertaining as a crank speech from a bearded Trotskyite in Hyde Park. Alas, Pleasantville also has a two-hour plus running time to fill up...and the makers have been forced to try and stretch their five-minute rhetorical analogy into a feature picture with workable characters and story. The final result, I grieve to report, will please any members of the choir who might happen to show up...but hardly anyone else.

Still, one has to admire the chutzpah. Who'da thunk, in this day and age, that a major Hollywood studio could be persuaded to bankroll what is essentially a high-tech nineties remake of Hair? The "story" runs something like this: two modern day teenagers (played by the talented Toby McGuire and Reese Witherspoon) get magically zapped into a bland fifties sitcom where they are suddenly expected to unlearn the cultural lessons of the last forty years and fit themselves into new roles as "Bud" and "Mary Sue" -- mindless pod kids out of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They choose instead to become Teen Messiahs; merry pranksters chosen to lead their stuffy elders and mouseketeer friends into a new and groovy age of peace and freedom. They don't actually put LSD into the drinking water but as our two young revolutionaries begin to teach their classmates about "free love" and to leave copies of Catcher in the Rye lying around, the effect is pretty much the same. People start tripping out; seeing wild new colors everywhere, painting modern art in unlikely places, taking their clothes off. A lovely, sensual rain scene lacks only the Cowsills on the soundtrack and a piece of hard candy under the tongue. But, as you might expect, there is also a darker point to be made here in Pleasantville. Just as in real life, sinister reactionary forces lurk just under the surface of all this suburban quietude and they respond to our giddy miracle in violent, repressive ways. Books get burnt, minorities get segregated, family values get spelled out and enforced...and for a moment "Bud" and "Mary Sue" seem destined to wind up in that same roadside ditch with Captain America and Billy. Good eventually conquers evil only when the persecutors themselves finally admit that they, too, would like a little sex and freedom...and agree to join the fun. Then everybody lives happily ever after. Fade to black.

Yes, this is really the story. Had Pleasantville appeared on cinema screens during October of 1968 rather than October of 1998 there'd be no mystery at all. We would now class it nostalgically with Godspell, Woodstock, Billy Jack, and the Beatles' "All You Need is Love." But this is, in fact, 1998 -- and at this point if anybody seems to be missing the cultural lessons of the last forty years it would have to be writer/director Gary Ross.

First of all, Mr. Ross still seems to be wrestling with that extinct prehistoric animal called "The Generation Gap." I mean personally. After all, haven't most of us from that era made at least a little peace with Mom and Dad's position back then...now that we have children and station wagons (or minivans) of our own? Not Mr. Ross. He's going to stick to his guns, do or die -- and it sinks his ambitious sociological allegory right from the very first reel. To put it briefly, the director can't even cut the Fifties enough slack to make his Pleasantville pleasant -- something which would seem to be essential to his theme. The imaginary town he creates, supposedly "typical" of Fifties TV mores is, in fact, so grotesque and exaggerated as to be nearly unrecognizable; a nightmarish cross between 1984 and The Stepford Wives which no sane person from any decade -- would willingly remain in for half an hour. So if the point is supposed to be that a dangerous freedom is better than a comfortable cage (a perfectly valid point -- made by many fifties films and TV shows) then Mr. Ross should at least have put his personal revulsion down long enough to make the lure of his fool's paradise a little alluring. No sir. This story still hits far too close to the mark for that. The best he can manage is to have everyone in the cast call it pleasant over and over again. But what we actually see is entirely revolting by any standard; loveless marriage, universal illiteracy, ridiculous piles of greasy breakfast which everyone supposedly eats. To his credit, Mr. Ross at least admits this complete lack of affinity for his material; in a current interview he confesses to having "never watched much fifties television." This strikes me -- from a man who has just made a film about it -- as rather incredible. It makes me feel as if I'm getting a lecture about the temptations of the flesh from a castrated eunuch.

Anyone who has actually troubled to watch some Fifties' TV will know immediately -- unless similarly constrained by ideology --that "Pleasantville" is balderdash. Just what, after all, is this hypothetical TV monstrosity supposed to represent? Is it supposed to be a dig at Leave It To Beaver? If so, where is Eddie Haskell? Is it modeled on Father Knows Best? Then what about Bud (namesake to "Pleasantville's" preposterously dutiful son)? Wasn't the actual Bud from the Fifties a bit of a lounger -- a slouching, ill-mannered wiseacre who'd rather be tinkering with his hot rod than studying? Admittedly, this isn't quite cutting-edge Nineties slacker behavior -- but it's not Invasion of the Body Snatchers, either. Perhaps "Pleasantville" is aping the wildly satirical Many Loves of Dobie Gillis? Or the coolly sardonic Eve Arden in Our Miss Brooks? Or the brilliant and subversive comedy of The Dick Yan Dyke Show? If not these, then what? Even the much-maligned Donna Reed Show is a good deal more self-reflexive than Mr. Ross would have us believe. The Dad there (played by the amusing Carl Betz) is downright oafish and the show makes rather a point of illustrating that he's as helpless as a child without his wife's constant supervision. This particular device, in fact, was actually a Fifties' cliche. Maybe the women in "Pleasantville" treat their husbands as benign, omnipotent dictators but the heroines of genuine fifties sitcoms -- from Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners to Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy -- look on them as endearingly idiotic figureheads. Yes, they will allow their husband the decorous fantasy of "wearing the pants in this family" -- but once he's gone they laugh about it with the girls over bridge and plot how to spend the crisp ten-spot they've filched from his wallet while he was asleep.

Well, then. If we've established that the typical Fifties TV program at the center of Pleasantville is nothing at all like the typical TV program of the actual fifties (much less like the fifties themselves) then what is it like? Unfortunately, it's exactly like most other Hollywood fantasies about people with "family values": a smug, self-congratulatory hatchet-job. The publicity materials accompanying the film identify Mr. Ross' target plainly: "Pleasantville is an inquiry into the emotional basis behind censorship and intolerance." In other words, if the characters here ring false, if they move through the story like X's and O's on a diagram, it may just be because they are nothing more or less than elbow-in-the-ribs stand-ins for the director's real life ideological foes.

Let me say plainly (in order to eliminate a tiresome red herring) that I, myself, am no great friend of tub-thumbing right-wing moralism. And there's no doubt at all that much "conservative thought" today truly does constitute a vain attempt to recreate a lost American utopia that never was. But surely any old stick at all is not good enough to beat these people with? I mean, can it really be to anyone's advantage to paint these great Twentieth century upheavals in quite such cartoonish colors? Undoubtedly the Fifties really were unhealthy in some pretty fundamental ways; these people seem to have taken a sort of abstract joy in structure for its own sake and just why this is the case would have been a profitable subject to explore. I personally think that the events of the preceding twenty years had left those who came of age in that decade with something akin to post-traumatic shock syndrome. Think of it: an American born in 1930 spent his childhood in the Great Depression, his adolescence during the greatest war in human history, learned of the Holocaust about the same time he learned the facts of life, and lived his teen years under the perpetual shadow of the H-bomb. Is it really so unintelligible that such a person should reach adulthood with a hell-bent determination to carve out a quiet little niche for himself and stay there for the duration? Similarly, Fifties' Dads just a bit older likely celebrated their 21st birthdays in God-forsaken WWII hell-holes straight out of Saving Private Ryan (a film which makes, by the way, a nice chaser after Pleasantville -- Private Ryan, where heroism requires a bit more than learning to masturbate in the bathtub). But however understandable it may have been, the morbid quiescence of the Fifties -- a whole society resolved to sit very, very still in hopes that things won't unravel any further --ought not to have been tolerated as long as it was. The world did need, and badly, the kind of spiritual renaissance which the youth movements of the 1960's promised -- and at least partially delivered. But at this point we come to Pleasantville's final and most fatal offense.

In 1968 it may have been credible that one might build a new and bright future entirely out of platitudes like "Give Peace a Chance" and "All You Need is Love." After all, hadn't new worlds been created in the past with flaming truisms like "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity"? But (and I really do hate to belabor this point) this is 1998 -- and we now have thirty years of experimental evidence to the effect that just simply telling everyone to "do their own thing" does not, in fact, suffice to put the world back to the Garden of Eden. Thirty years of divorce, suicide, adultery, latch-key kids, abortion, drug-addiction, and STD's; all these are glibly dismissed by Mr. Ross with a vague nod to the idea that freedom may be "a little scary." To hear Pleasantville tell it, all the world needs is sheer inchoate upheaval; blind, unquestioned and unquestionable freedom on a case-by-case basis to do whatever your little heart desires. Once we have this, we will have the best of all possible worlds. Anyone who suggests otherwise -- Moses, Aristotle, Confucius, Jesus, Lao Tze, or Lincoln -- is a fascist.

True, Mr. Ross attempts to deflect such criticisms by making his picture of the 1990s somewhat true-to-life; there is AIDS, there is global warming, there are broken homes. In fact, we see hints of a better film in these scenes. His character David -- a late-nineties teen so traumatized by the sordid chaos around him that he almost seems to be willing himself backward into an intact family on TV -- is a potent, pathetic creation who might have been the vehicle for an authentic exploration of changing times. But Pleasantville as it stands certainly isn't it. In fact, the filmmaker lets the cat out of the bag at the most crucial moment. When the Sixties finally come to Pleasantville... the final result is utopia, complete and unmitigated. The hippies get a second chance... and this time it works out as we predicted after all.

As I said to begin with, there is a kind of beauty in such a robust faith. And to watch an artist still clinging to the lost, magnificent dream of his youth -- well, one would have to have a heart of stone not to repsond to such an image on some level. It's also nice to know that not everyone in Washington these days is quite so cynical as we thought; Mr. Ross works part time as a speechwriter at the Clinton White House -- apparently a bona fide true-believer turned loose on our nation's capital.

But for a film who's movie poster tag line is "Nothing is as simple as black and white", I'm afraid Pleasantville assigns its black hats and white hats like a Republic Studios B-western starring Roy Rogers and Smiley Burnett.