Small Town America on Film: Pleasantville, Far from Heaven, and Revolutionary Road

The small town is “a deeply rooted symbol in the country’s collective consciousness,” more than a place, it’s “a distinct life-style with its own set of values,” and, implicitly, its own set of drawbacks (Levy 15). The phrase itself has come to carry a double layer of meaning, at once sentimental and condescending. It has been a “permanent staple of the American cinema” since its inception (Levy 16). The image of the small town in film has changed drastically over the past century, influenced by social and historical events and phases of the country, from an idealized and romanticized version in the 1930s, to the idea of small town as prison, a repressive environment of conformity and dull homogeneity in the 1950s, and everything in between. However, from the very beginning, it has been the image of the ideal, rather than its realization, that has ensured the survival of the small town as myth, “at once historical (specific) and universal (atemporal),” providing both “a version of concrete history and a vision of existence” (MacKinnon 3, Levy 20). Gary Ross’ Pleasantville (1998), Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), and Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) all depict the less-than-sunny side of small towns and suburbia, in a very personal way, and at the same time their characters stand in as representatives for society as a whole, individuals who gave in to the idea of the middle-class American Dream of success in the small town, and found themselves trapped by the environment’s blandness, boredom, and the constant obsession of keeping up with the Joneses

All of these movies take place in the fifties, and it has been that era, more than any other, that seems to epitomize and perpetuate the image of the suburban/small town ideal, chock-full of family values carried “to the heights of saccharine platitudinousness” in shows like Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave it to Beaver, “shows with lots of teeth—teeth that were all evenly spaced, capped, and pearly white. But not teeth that actually bit into anything, [in] a world nicely contained in a box in which there were no problems that couldn’t be solved in twenty-two minutes,” (Simon 67, Wynne-Jones 31). These “kinder, gentler” times we reconstruct from TV reruns and movies of the 1950s bear little resemblance to reality, and in films like Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross, we begin to see the true colors of this antiseptic view of the past (Sharett 65). Like any fairytale, the movie begins with “Once upon a time,” and transports the viewer into this “mythic utopia” we have made of the fifties (Maio 89).

Mud (2013)

 

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” Norman Maclean writes in the last lines of his autobiographical meditation on family, faith, and fly fishing, A River Runs Through It: “The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” I couldn’t help but think of these words as I watched Jeff Nichol’s Mud, a down in the delta coming of age story that takes place in the wide mythic space where the Mississippi opens up and the horizon stretches boldly to infinity, expanding to encompass the whole world. On that threshold, reality and illusion, the past and the future, the sky and the river become one, and all things merge, pregnant with promise and hope.

But the unstill Southern waters Nichols wades in are as murky and dangerous as the past of the movie’s title character, a tattooed, broken-toothed bayou noir hero who cares about honor and justice more than he’d like to admit. With a graceful, unhurried rhythm and a rustic regional temperament, the movie reaches the patience and picturesque pastoral sights of a Terrence Malick film. Unlike Malick, however, the director of Mud places his characters firmly within their setting but also above it, offering subtleties and surprises in the way of suspense, humor, and a climax that would put many an action film to shame.