In Pleasantville, the temperature is a sunny 72, the Fire Department gets cats out of trees, and every basketball shot is a perfect swish. There is no uncertainty, there are no existential crises: everyone knows who they are and what they do. From a certain point of view, it's paradise. No divorces, no drive-by shootings, no presidential sex scandals: who wouldn't envy its citizens their perfect little world?

Of course, Pleasantville is no more real than the smile in a toothpaste commercial; as the faux-Nick at Nite opening to the movie named for this prefab Utopia informs us, Pleasantville is a long-running '50s sitcom, a throwback to the days when Father still knew best. Featuring the Parkers—George, Betty and their children Mary Sue and Bud—it's a hymn to the homogeneous. When George (William H. Macy) walks in the front door, hangs his hat as if he's done it a thousand times, and yells, "Honey, I'm home!", the audience explodes into applause like it's welcoming an old friend. But by the time Pleasantville is over, you may begin to hear something else in that applause, something like desperation. In Macy's mouth, George's entrance sounds less like a catchphrase than a ritual, a weekly reminder that things are as they always have been.

Four decades later, the show serves much the same purpose for David (Tobey Maguire), a whey-faced teenager with no discernible social life, a sister who'd rather he didn't exist, and a divorced mother who can barely hold herself together. David is the master of Pleasantville trivia, and as the movie begins, he's gearing up for the 24-hour Pleasantville marathon, which to him is something like a dream come true.

Our introduction to David comes as he's asking a beautiful girl out on a date; the camera cuts from her blond perfection to his nervous face, and we're sure rejection is imminent. But the truth is even crueler. Cut to a longer shot, and David is standing alone on the edge of a vast concrete plain, the girl we thought he was talking to some 30 feet away. Her proximity, the fruit of David's desires, was nothing but a trick of the camera, and David is still alone. So Pleasantville introduces, subtly, its most important theme: the camera photographs desire, not reality, and you can't live inside an illusion.

David and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) begin to learn this firsthand when, with the aid of what can only be called a magic remote control, the two are suddenly transported into the world of David's favorite TV show. To the smiling citizens of Pleasantville, they're Bud and Mary Sue Parker. Once again, the camera has given David what he wants.

At first, both twins are a little uneasy, but Jennifer makes it her mission to rebel against Pleasantville's strictures. David settles, if uneasily, into the role of Bud: he knows that cheery figure watering the grass is Mr. Simpson from the hardware store; if he gets lost, he can find his way by asking, "Are we in that episode?" But the sexually hyperactive Jennifer is less willing to transform herself into good-girl Mary Sue; as she tells her brother, "No one is happy in a poodle skirt and sweater set."

After Jennifer seduces the captain of the basketball team (who was only looking to give her his pin, and perhaps one day hold hands), cracks start to appear in Pleasantville's seamless black-and-white facade. The basketball team starts missing shots, and, slowly, color begins to work its way into the town's monochromatic landscape. It starts with superfluous things: the bloom on a rose, the cherry-red of a convertible, and soon people follow suit; their lips, faces, whole bodies become islands of color in a sea of shade.

The paintbrush of change sweeps rapidly through Pleasantville after that, and at some point the film begins to shift gears. David is horrified at first by the changes in the town he knows so well, but he begins to realize the price paid by its inhabitants. While Pleasantville looks idyllic from the outside, he finds that living inside it is hardly living at all. The citizens play out their robotic lives without thinking, and where choices come, crises are not far behind. "Grill the bun, flip the meat, melt the cheese. What's the point?" laments Mr. Johnson (Jeff Daniels), Bud's boss at the soda shop.

And not all Pleasantvillians react pleasantly. Led by the mayor (an unctuous J.T. Walsh, in his last performance), a sort of Decency Alliance arises to protect the "TRUE citizens of Pleasantville." Arming themselves against the "coloreds," they pass a proclamation limiting the colors of paint and the kinds of music, and shutting down Lover's Lane, where thanks to Jennifer angelic coos have been replaced by ecstatic moans.

The movie's transition from lightweight fantasy to social commentary is a rocky but welcome one; it takes Pleasantville from the realm of escapism to something more genuinely perceptive. From Pleasantville's first mention as a project in production, the movie has been incessantly compared to The Truman Show, but Pleasantville scores in exactly the place where Truman dropped the ball. Despite its generally congratulatory notices, Truman remained shallow and unenlightening because of a misdirected focus. While Hollywood celebrities may think it's interesting to pontificate on what it's like to be watched, it's far more interesting to think about the people who are watching them. That is, us.

On a basic plot level, the story of Pleasantville is facile and even cheap, a simplistic fairy tale of humans throwing off the weight of oppression and learning to do their own thing. The markers writer/director Gary Ross chooses to represent the town's passage into the modern era—artists like Van Gogh and Picasso, books like Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn - are too uncontroversial to have much impact. (Does anyone still not think that Starry Night is real art?) But the film's second half is filled with allusions to the real culture wars of the 1950s: segregation, book burnings, debates over "jungle music," and that makes the movie about not just what's on TV, but who watches it, and why.

Ross, whose father was a blacklisted screenwriter, knows that 1950s shows like Father Knows Best were popular not just because they brought people together, but because they were islands of stability in a world some people desperately wanted not to change. Not just entertainment, they sent a clear message: this is what the world is supposed to be like, and if you don't see yourself on screen, it's because you're not supposed to be there.

The cultural panic of the 1950s is all over Pleasantville's second half. It's in J.T. Walsh's glare, in the logo that overlooks the "TRUE Citizens"' meeting: two white hands clasped together, less in friendship than as a barricade. Most of all, it's in William H. Macy's baffled sadness as he comes home to an empty house. "Where's my dinner?" he says over and over again, his lament turning into accusation the more he repeats it.

Ross' observation isn't exactly new, and he doesn't do enough finger-pointing at the '90s (where most of the people on TV are still white and middle-class) to make Pleasantville a particularly pointed satire. But he embodies an old truth in a new-enough way that it makes us feel it again. The slow arrival of color is a brilliantly realized metaphor for the dawning of freedom, and some of the shots used to express it are surprisingly beautiful—far more so than anything in the gloppy What Dreams May Come. A black and white tree bursts into orange flame, and Lover's Lane becomes an Eden of pale pink petals gently falling. Ross, a first-time director and author of such extended fantasies as Big and Dave, manages to keep his conceit running for the entire movie, constantly finding new twists on the basic concept. The movie doesn't teach you anything new, but it doesn't retread old ground, either. It's like having someone else find the words for something you thought but couldn't quite say.

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