Thinking about Pleasantville

I just caught the last half of this movie on cable (here it is on IMDB). (I'll be sad when we give that up - it's nice to have ten channels of bad movies to flip through, but we can't afford to keep the crap when we don't need it. I suppose we can't make that argument too strenuously, though, because who really needs TV? What the hell is it for anymore? So that you don't feel bored when you're at home and you have nothing to do? That's a different post.)

Anyway, I was watching this movie and I got hooked. It helps that I like the ladies in it. It helps more, I think, that there is this broad population of sympathetic characters stifled in simple yet powerful ways. It's a wonderful idea for a plot, and I like Tobey McGuire (is that how you spell it?) too.

I want to think more about why this movie gets to me, though. I think part of it is the mother. Tobey's mother. She's so sad, and convincing in her self-discovery. And the cafe dude who paints. I love the way that he stares at the art book when Tobey brings it in. You don't think that a guy like that will be able to enjoy a book with abstract naked pictures in it. But there's that great scene where he just stares at it a few minutes. And you watch his face as it seems to be blank, but he's stuck on it. Staring, as if absorbed by it. And what bookish person can fail to enjoy the scene where the kids are bringing books to Tobey and asking him how they end? That's fabulous - that the public library can become a threatening place because of what's in the books? You can tell this is a fantasy.

The plot is predictable and perhaps even tiresome, with the only slightly interesting gimmick of the black-and-white slowly becoming color. I suppose I'm saying that I don't know why this cheesy movie gets to me.

Let's look at parts that work best for me. I really like the part when Tobey gets William H. Macy to change color in the courtroom. The way that he uses his words to pull the color out of Macy is great - and the way that he gets him to express his love for his wife, in a world where it's not okay to do that. Bizarre as that is, that seems to be the premise. Passion is not acceptable. So this scene - where Tobey pulls such an obvious and commonplace passion out of Macy - becomes rather powerful because of . . . well, I still don't know yet. Because I'm a sap for that? Maybe.

Maybe it's because of Reese Witherspoon. Having sex with her boyfriend at Lover's Lane doesn't make her change color, because she's a slut in her real life and sex doesn't arouse passion in her anymore. But reading D.H. Lawrence does! That's fabulous.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's going on. Jeff Daniels (the cafe guy) is a convincing natural artist. Tobey is a good aw-shucks, relucant revolutionary. I like those things. I like a movie that makes me feel like someone similar to me - Tobey is a lot like millions of nerds out there - can do something meaningful and important. Maybe it's just that simple. I don't really (want to) believe that, but maybe it is.

The more I think about it, the more I like the color-changing gimmick. It's something that is really easy to dramatize on film, and something that conveys meaning immediately. You can invest it with all sorts of connotation - the "no coloreds" signs in the window bring up an analogy to racism and the lynching that was still occurring in the 50's - and it really manages to load things into the image that aren't easy to put there in other ways. I don't know, I guess I think in terms of print and writing too much to really appreciate something like this, but it's effective.