The plunder of a masterpiece for piffle

Bad novels tend to make better films than good ones. You could call it an axiom of adaptation: the virtues of great prose rarely survive the leap to the screen from the page. What you really want, as a filmmaker in search of inspiration, is material — the intriguing high-concept, the irresistible scenario, the spellbinding tale or yarn. You want amusing characters and a third-act twist nobody will predict and a plot that’s practically labyrinthine. You want something like The Godfather or Gone Girl: exhilarating tripe. Literary merit you can do without.

American Pastoral is a good novel — one of the great novels, a high master- piece, the equal surely of Portnoy’s Complaint — and American Pastoral is now a very bad film. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read American Pastoral, because American Pastoral has about as much in common with the likes of The Godfather or Gone Girl as Madame Bovary has with The Girl on the Train.

Allow me to pluck my copy from the shelf and choose from it a passage more or less at random: Well, yes, beautiful. But “history, in fact, is a very sudden thing:” how do you translate such a sentiment for the silver screen?

Ewan McGregor doesn’t even know where to begin. The film is his first as director, and needless to say he does not have the command of the camera that Philip Roth has of the pen. His approach to the adaptation ranges from stupefyingly literal — American flags abound — to the hopelessly oblivious, beginning with what he does to Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s longtime hero and thinly veiled literary alter ego. Now, American Pastoral tells the story of Seymour “The Swede” Levov. But it’s Zuckerman who’s doing the telling: everything we read about the Swede’s tragedy arrives filtered through Nate’s imagination. This distance is crucial. McGregor — who plays the Swede himself — seems to think it’s a whim, a fancy. He introduces Zuckerman as a framing device and presents the Swede’s saga as objective truth.

The effect of this change, of which McGregor seems perfectly unaware, is colossal. It neutralizes the novel’s irony, flattens its nuance, distorts its indispensable perspective. And it poses an obvious question: why adapt a novel if everything that makes the novel interesting is doomed to be rejected?

What McGregor seems to aspire toward here is the meagre triumph of a commonplace prestige picture, the sort that says something grand about the world and affords marquee talent like Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Connelly plenty of opportunities to weep and scream and wear nice period clothing. Fine, fine: that kind of thing is inevitable this time of year. But did you really need to sully Roth for that? Did you really need to plunder a work of genius to find piffle?

Philip Roth was never much for spellbinding yarns. His novels were sparsely plotted, featured casts more often loathsome than amusing, and — with the exception of The Breast (in which the hero transforms into a human-sized mammary) and maybe Operation Shylock (in which Roth himself discovers a Philip Roth impostor on a media blitz in Israel) — were never what you’d describe as high-concept. What they are is exquisitely written. Essential to American Pastoral’s genius as a novel are its style, its character, its voice. Absent those qualities — refashioned as a sombre awards-season drama utterly void of wit or zest — American Pastoral the film is nothing. Ω