As he did with Big and Dave, writer and director Gary Ross uses comedy to deal with the value conflicts which continue to divide Americans. Here he sides with free spirits and the spiritual practice of transformation. Don't trust or join any group, organization, or community that is frightened of change or that wants a monochrome world. Follow your bliss. Express your deepest and truest emotions. And never fail to celebrate the many-colored splendors of your true spirit!
             "Pleasantville" quickly sketches a world in which teenagers David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), who live with their divorced mom, face a rotten future - poor job prospects, the continued spread of HIV, global warming and the like. The youngsters adopt different ways of coping; for Jennifer, it's a hard-edged attitude and promiscuity, while David retreats inward and is hooked on an old TV series, "Pleasantville." He consoles himself by laughing at its milk-and-cookies vision of domestic life.
             In Pleasantville, Ross tackles his country's obsessive compulsion to indulge in intolerance, repression and racism in the name of false gods such as 'family values' and social stability. Pleasantville is a mindless society of drones.
             Soon the town is divided: Those in colour and those still in B&W. Mistrust grows. A store sign goes up: "No Coloreds" and Ross blatantly signals his racial satirical intentions.
             A trial scene is modelled after To Kill A Mockingbird. The mayor-judge (the late J.T. Walsh) looks like Hitler from Chaplin's The Great Dictator. There are Nazi-like book burnings after the pages of books begin to fill in magically.
             The "good old days" also gave us racism, McCarthyism and cultural homogeneity. They were populated by Roy Cohn, Pat Boone and Sheriff Bull Connor. We had gas guzzlers and just three channels to choose from. Television was black and white because life was black and white.
             In Pleasantville, screenwriter and first-tim...