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Pleasantville is a good choice for a classically liberal movie, and you've listed all its moral claims for liberalism over Ozzie-and-Harriet "retro" America. The film would have us believe that, before liberalism arrived, the country had never had a generous impulse. It also slips a punch, in that the Ozzies and Harriets the film vilifies......also voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times. How do you square that with what Pleasantville says about America in the Fifties?

For nastiness, though, Pleasantville is far outstripped by the contemporary Arlington Road, which is just vile and slanders straight, conservative America as a bunch of car-bombers. Tim Robbins has done a number of portrayals like this, and rivals Gary Oldman (The Contender, JFK) as an enthusiastic portrayer of bad guys generally, but never with more relish than when they are played as "conservatives" or authority figures (The Player).

Oh yeah, "Arlington Road", there's another Tim Robbins special. One I haven't seen mentioned is his "Bob Roberts", where he plays a Republican candidate who is, shock of shocks, crooked and slimy!

And no mention of comrade Oliver Stone? The all-time champ for psychotic liberal lunacy HAS to be "JFK". Nothing else is close. Except for his "Salvador","Talk Radio", "Wall Street", "Nixon", "Born on the Fourth of July","Natural Born Killers". And his next movie is about Castro. Can't wait.

I couldn't watch "Arlington Road." It was too much like a Nazi propaganda film. It was at once crude and chillingly sophisticated the way that they ascribed pure evil and diabolical cunning to characters who in real life would have been different. Even if Robbins's character had been pure evil, he wouldn't have had the patience to do what he did in the film.

Basically, what the filmmakers were doing was attributing to Robbins character all the traits that other paranoia films had ascribed to agents of other governments or our own. And that transfer wasn't very well done. You could see just how flimsy and contrived it was, and how crudely it fit together.

What Hollywood does is to take the hostility and fear that "outsiders" produce in cultures and societies and direct it against "insiders," or "people like us." Unfortunately this is done with all the crudeness that earlier societies brought to their fear of outsiders. It's combined with some technical cleverness, but you can see that it's just an attempt to turn old folktales into political propaganda.