Plot
David (Maguire) and his sister Jennifer (Witherspoon) lead different high-school social lives. Jennifer is shallow and extroverted, David is introverted and spends most of his time watching television. One evening while their mother (Kaczmarek) is away, they fight over the TV; Jennifer wants a concert, David wants to watch a marathon of Pleasantville, a black and white 1958 sitcom about the idyllic Parker family. During the fight, the remote control breaks and the TV cannot be turned on manually.
A mysterious TV repairman (Knotts) shows up, quizzes David about Pleasantville, then gives him a strange remote control. The repairman leaves, and David and Jennifer resume fighting. However, they are somehow transported into the Parkers' black and white Pleasantville living room. David tries to reason with the repairman (with whom he communicates through the Parkers' television) but succeeds only in chasing him away. David and Jennifer must now pretend they are Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the son and daughter on the show.
David and Jennifer witness the wholesome nature of the town, such as a group of firemen rescuing a cat from a tree. David tells Jennifer they must stay in character and not disrupt the lives of the town's citizens, who do not notice any difference between Bud and Mary Sue, and David and Jennifer. To keep the show's plot, Jennifer dates a boy from high school but has sex with him, a concept unknown to him and everyone else in town.
Slowly, Pleasantville begins changing from black and white to color, including flowers and the faces of people who have experienced bursts of emotion. David becomes friends with Mr. Johnson (Daniels), owner of the soda fountain, and introduces him to colorful modern art via a book from the library, sparking in him an interest in painting. Johnson and Betty Parker (Allen) fall in love, causing her to leave home, throwing George Parker (Macy), Bud and Mary Sue's father, into confusion. The only people who remain unchanged are the town fathers, led by the mayor, Big Bob (Walsh), who sees the changes eating at the values of Pleasantville. They resolve to do something about their increasingly independent wives and rebellious children.
As the townsfolk become more colorful, a ban on "colored" people is initiated in public venues. Eventually a riot is touched off by a nude painting of Betty on the window of Mr. Johnson’s soda fountain. The soda fountain is destroyed, books are burned, and people who are "colored" are harassed in the street. As a reaction, the town fathers announce rules preventing people from visiting the library, playing loud music, or using paint other than black, white, or gray. In protest, David and Mr. Johnson paint a colorful mural on a brick wall, depicting their world, but are arrested. Brought to trial in front of the town, David and Mr. Johnson defend their actions, arousing enough anger and indignation in Big Bob that the mayor becomes colored as well.
Having seen Pleasantville change irrevocably, Jennifer stays to finish her education, but David uses the remote control to return to the real world.
Read more about this topic: Pleasantville (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)