Film Review - "Pleasantville"

[Note - For this, we were given the specific prompt of considering the piece in the context of Jonathan Rosenbaum's discussion of independent film, and Manny Farber's notions of white elephant art and termite art.]

Color in Grayscale

Critics Manny Farber and Jonathan Rosenbaum each articulated a different set of distinctions.  For Farber, “termite art” is art that breaks boundaries and creates something new and more or less unprecedented, contrasting with the formulaic, self conscious, and hackneyed “white elephant art.” For Rosenbaum, “independent film” was contrasted with both mainstream films and mainstream films pretending to be “independent” through affectations. 

“Pleasantville” is a mainstream white elephant film with independent fashionings, a pleasant enough romp, but what does it bring to the table?  There is nothing novel about replacing the failings of a false ideal with an equally Manichean opposite.  On the surface, the film seems to urge us to be ourselves, but the quest for color is more straightforward.  Colorization is a clever and novel metaphor for personal growth, but the film’s Hollywood emphasis on causality transforms development and individual redemption into an easter egg hunt in pursuit of the one perfect action that is the key to the lock of repression and internal stagnation.  It’s the same tired trope whose tunes we’ve been twirling to for decades in mainstream cinema, in which happiness is reduced to some sort of MacGuffin of character development as a shorthand for a honest growth. 

There are things to celebrate in the free expression of sexuality as an ideal, but what of the complications that arise as a direct result, of pregnancy, or disease?  What of the influences of jealousy, boredom, lust, manipulation, and selfishness? “Pleasantville” thinks it lacks room for the sort of exploration, experimentation, or discovery that are the hallmarks of genuine termite works, or independent cinema as the town thought it lacked room for “unpleasant” things.  Its adherence to conventionality are is elephant, a self-congratulatory exercise with the motivation of  delivering the tired Hollywood tropes of “be yourself and it will all work out”  and providing the audience with a straw man justification for feeling more progressive than our recent ancestors.

            The film is problematic.  The “colored” people of Pleasantville, held up as some statement of free individuality against the hegemonic patriarchy of the establishment, spend most of the film doing and thinking what Tobey MacGuire’s David tells them to do or think, trading control for control.  Consider the marriage of Joan Allen’s Betty to William H. Macy’s George.  Betty spends most of the film drifting away from her husband and into an affair with Jeff Daniels’ Bill.  But in Hollywood fashion, the troubles of an ailing marriage are not explored; they are established, and then solved with a single, generica monologue saying…what, exactly? Love conquers all? Joan loves her husband after all, after most of the film pointing to the contrary?  It doesn’t say anything, really, and that’s the point.  It isn’t trying to.  It’s just one more loose end to be rubberstamped “Resolved” in pure white elephant nonindependent fashion.  Colorization begins as an interesting metaphor that completely devolves into a crutch facilitating the laziness of an audience that can point, with immediacy, to a character and say, “Look, redemption!”  So it is with the entire film.