The Story: What's It All About

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The Story: What's It All About?

When I was a kid (not that long ago, thank you), movies made me dream of what my life would be like when I grew up. After coming back from a great movie, I could sit in my room for hours and fantasize about the worlds I would see and the places I would visit outside my bedroom window, the places that only exist in that narrow, nebulous space between dreaming and waking. As I grew older, "wiser" and less innocent, I realized that those moments of fantasy can only be captured for a moment. As is the cruelty of adulthood, they are banished in an instant when the alarm clock rings, leaving only sorrow, regret and the slim anticipation that upon the next morning's sunrise, that glorious moment may return yet again to taunt you with that briefest of serjeanties.

Pleasantville, though not a perfect film, brought me to that place again, if only for a few moments. Though critical consensus of the film was mixed and audience reaction more muted than expected, I found it to be a wonderful and moving fantasy, and one of the few films to understand the medium of film and what stories are best told with it. One thing I remember most about movies from my childhood is that they knew they were movies. Today, we often just get glorified television shows, desperate attempts at literary adaptations, or, worst of all, video games blown up to big-screen proportions.

But, with Pleasantville, something many critics missed was that this film could only be done through the medium of film. Its inspired tableau of a black and white world turning to color could never be conveyed with he written word, through a song or in the theater, no matter how great those mediums may be. Pleasantville, you see, is pure cinema.

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The story line is as simple as it is sublime. Teenaged Tobey Maguire lives unhappy and unfulfilled in a typical 90's household, with a lonely mother, long since deserted by her husband, who bounces from one boyfriend to the next,, Meanwhile, sister Reese Witherspoon fills up the emptiness with, well...she's the school slut. Tobey tunes it all out by hiding int he world of Pleasantville, his favorite 50's TV show (think Leave It To Beaver, only twice as perfect). After setting up this admittedly thin scenario, the film wastes no time in plunging the brother and sister into the world ...

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