The Talkies: Unpleasantries
Bowman, James
This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text. Joan Allen as his submissive wife "Betty." But "Bud" and "Mary Sue," their two perfect sitcom...
...And he gets whacked, too, by the increasingly frantic Michael...
...The same blind spot shows up in Robert B. Weide's otherwise enjoyable documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth...
...ou could say that the first people to y attack the 1950's lived in the 1890's...
...At first Christian's words are greeted with stunned silence, except for one poor uncle or cousin who absent-mindedly starts to clap until he realizes that everyone else is paralyzed with mortification...
...But "Bud" and "Mary Sue," their two perfect sitcom children, are soon replaced by David himself and his slutty sister Jen (Reese Witherspoon), who are magically transported back in time to 1958 and the self-contained, monochromatic world of Pleasantville, from which they are unable to escape...
...We're, like, stuck in Nerdville," says Jen furiously to her brother...
...Michael is a violent-tempered ruffian who treats his poor wife and children abominably, but he is desperate to mend his fences with daddy...
...You get the idea...
...It is in its own way a perfect world, as every watcher of old-fashioned sitcoms will know...
...Above all, no one knows anything about sex beyond the wholesome desire of teenage boys and girls to hold hands with each other...
...Like the guests at the party, we very much want to take this excuse to return to the fun, but Christian keeps popping up again and again like a damned Whacka-Mole to insist on his version of the family history...
...Everybody is behaving sexually and everything is changing from black and white to color as a determined band of right-wing crazies, led by the late J.T...
...One daughter, Linda, has recently committed suicide and one son, Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen), is in disgrace with Papa for something he said while drunk at the last family gathering...
...antiquated city ordinances that Bruce, who was himself shockingly politically incorrect, so gleefully challenged...
...Told on arrival that his name is not on the guest list, Michael alternately bullies and wheedles in order to get a room in the hotel...
...I knew you couldn't be so hopelessly geeky for so long without serious consequences...
...We learn two things straightaway about the recent history of this family...
...In this month's Movie of the Month, Thomas Vinterberg's remarkable Danish film The Celebration, there are echoes of Strindberg and Bergman and even a quotation from Ibsen's Ghosts—a quotation offered not as a quotation but with apparent unconsciousness of its provenance to apply to the wealthy Danish family we see gathering at a familyowned luxury hotel to celebrate the 6oth birthday of its silver-haired patriarch, Helge (Henning Moritzen...
...Finally, another sister, Helene (Paprika Steen), stands up to deny that there is any truth in Christian's words — "and I ought to know...
...Say no to a sexual impulse and the next thing you know you're oppressing and exploiting people and burning books, as Walsh's thugs naturally proceed to do...
...The sexually liberated people, now in color, are shunned by other Pleasantvillites who put up signs saying "No Colored Allowed...
...Yet, unlike LaBute's and Solondz's, Vinterberg's comedy survives what would seem to be this staggeringly sobering moment unscathed, indeed enhanced...
...All of a sudden things start to change...
...A,} James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...
...The American Spectator • December 1998...
...But, finding that the dishy captain of the basketball team is attracted to her, Jen/Mary Sue hauls him off to Lovers' Lane and introduces him to real sex...
...Walsh, decrees that color be banned, women must stay home and keep house while their husbands go out to work, the schools must "teach the non-changeist version of history," and there can be no music but songs by Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, or Jack Jones, or Sousa marches...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website—httpl/wwwspectator.org...
...Only after his brother and Linda's twin, Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), intercedes for him does he get the room...
...This scene is a particularly telling indication of who it is that is really stuck in the "non-changeist" past, since nowadays the biggest threat to free speech comes not from the right but from the left...
...This grim charade is funny and horrifying at the same time, like King Lear, and by the time we get to the end of it and find out the truth we are unable to take comfort either in the reassuring façade of the conventional happy family or in the nowfamiliar but simplistic delight in tearing it away...
...There follow various funny episodes designed to suggest that farce is to ensue, but we are soon reminded of the comedies of Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz when Christian stands up to propose the eldest son's toast to his father and reveals that both he and his twin sister had been repeatedly raped by the old man when they were children...
...Weide never directly addresses the paradox of his progressive hero's recording a comic and stunningly racist riff on an old novelty number called "Bake dat Chicken Pie"— though with another routine, a weird counting exercise involving a party in which the numbers keep shifting of "niggers," "kikes," "wops," "guineas," "spicks," "micks," etc., there is just the hint of Bruce's belief that repeatedly using a racial epithet will rob it of its power to offend...
...It is Ibsen in clown makeup...
...Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1 966, was a genuinely funny man and a hero of free speech, but he is here presented as a precursor of the counterculture, and, safe upon his pedestal, is left with nothing to say to our own time when "politically correct" university speech codes and bans on "hate speech" are equivalent to the 44 Say no to sex and next thing you know you're oppressing people and burning books...
...Yet, somehow, decency and love survive, and without any Hollywoodish suggestion that they might depend on the absence of sexual restraint...
...Ibsen and Strindberg were the real pioneers of that now-familiar artistic impulse to rip away the tattered veils of bourgeois respectability, especially from family life...
...This is because the film is really about the embarrassment of such a revelation and the comedy it generates...
...Christian then leaves the room, and everyone tries to think of excuses to ignore him and continue with the party...
Vol. 31 • December 1998 • No. 12
