Here's a novelty glimpsed all too rarely this side of Terry Gilliam: a movie with too many ideas. Gary Ross, creator of those slight, high-concept crowd pleasers Dave and the ugly, sentimental Big - neo-Capra, if you will - ducks behind the camera for the first time here and we find him whipping together an although more sophisticated feast.

Not that the bus runs from Pleasantville to Alphaville; this is still bums-on-seats stuff. Audiences will take to its strong plot, likeable characters and sense of genuine goodness, if not the pleasingly liberal tub-thumping and elegant art direction it smuggles under their radar. It succeeds both as popular entertainment and soft polemic: cinema that's actually good for you.

David (The Ice Storm's eerily vacant Tobey Maguire), is an affable school dweeb addicted to the scarily perfect reruns of 50's sitcom Pleasantville. One night, though, with slutty sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) in tow, he is magically propelled into the TV and the literal black and white simplicity of Pleasantville itself. Where sex is unknown, where the basketball team never misses, and where all the library books are blank. An insidious, cancerous perfection.

That's until Jennifer blows the school jock and this monochrome universe begins to blossom. David is initially horrified, but begins to see art, literature and sex as worth more to the people of Pleasantville than what they had. Desire collides with atrophied lives, suddenly actions have consequences and the future has a future.

Bobbing in its wake, The Truman Show comparisons are inevitable, and to the detriment of Weir's wildly overpraised satire; whatever his shortcomings, Ross cannot be accused of sacrificing his film to The Big Idea. Truman wears its smarts on its sleeve: I am ingenious and undeniably polished, it crows. The pitch is more entertaining than the product. Ross, however, is careful to lard Pleasantville with sufficient knowing humour to offset its serious undertow. Convention is toyed with even as the picture hits us over the head with some surprisingly sly subversion. It might play to the same literally dim-witted Forrest Gump audience, but the two films are polar opposites.

Visually, certainly, it's at odds with the usual over-lit, TV-conscious stylings of much current Hollywood. The black and white cinematography is crisp and precise, the injections of colour subtle and organic. The film saves its bold hues for key moments, preferring an elegant petrol-wash effect. Unlike Truman, Ross' film is about images.

To Kill A Mockingbird, The Wizard of Oz, Rebel Without A Cause all take a hit in the screenplay, and there are visual echoes, however accidental, of Lynch's Blue Velvet; the ultimate cinematic Capra butt-fuck. Ross is playing with us and ultimately overburdens the picture, but the chill when the first "No Coloreds" sign goes up in a store window is real. And it's played to perfection by a fine cast: William H. Macy as the stiff-collared father; Joan Allen's sexual awakening at her teenage daughter's bidding; J.T Walsh (in his last film) as Mayor Big Bob; and Jeff Daniels as the artistically inclined diner owner.

The film's underlying message - that free will and tolerant, liberal values are worth more than picture book homilies to Rockwell Americana - is there to be applauded by all right thinking folk. Better The Simpsons, it seems to say, than The Waltons. George Bush would hate it.