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That's the not-so-hidden agenda of Pleasantville, an epic-size, largely entertaining parable of repression and awakening from writer-director Gary Ross. The movie imagines that two teenagers, David (Tobey Maguire) and his randy sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), are magically transported from the '90s into the small, sleepy town of David's favorite '50s sitcom. The "knows-best" father, George (William H. Macy), and his wife Betty (Joan Allen), all starched sweetness, are convinced that David is Bud, a.k.a. Sport, and that Jennifer, now outfitted in a poodle-skirt-and-sweater set, is Mary Sue--Muffin...
...color of dreams), a plot from The Purple Rose of Cairo (with actor Jeff Daniels linking two stories of real and reel life), a lot from The Truman Show (except that here everyone in town believes in the grand fiction of a perfectly ordered society). But Ross, who helped create two other fantasies of displacement, Big and Dave, has more in mind: Follow your heart, not the rules. And '50s bad, '60s good...
...known that whatever its message, the movie bubbles over with felicities. The actors, once they get over their early overplaying, are uniformly splendid. Ross gets plenty of smart fun from the collision of '50s and '90s: a "healthy" breakfast loaded with pork products, a mother-daughter sex talk in which Muffin explains the facts of life to Mom. Carpeting the film is Randy Newman's richest score, tremulous and true to the period; those yearning violins express an ache the Pleasantvillagers don't yet know they have...
Although Clinton has staked a lot politically on these talks, it is up to the two grown men who run Israel and the Palestinian Authority to think of what is best for the future of their peoples, and not Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright, Dennis Ross or others who have proven themselves not up to the task...
...forest to find the largest concentration of all manner of critters is in the regrowth that occurs in burns and clear-cuts. Inasmuch as we seldom let fire do its work in the forest, we are probably doing diversity a favor by selective logging and clear-cutting! DALE ROSS Ashland...