American Pastoral fails to illuminate audience
American Pastoral (out of 4) Starring Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning and David Strathairn. Directed by Ewan McGregor. Opens Friday at the Varsity. 108 minutes. 14A
Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning 1997 novel American Pastoral becomes a minor and disappointing directorial debut for actor Ewan McGregor.
McGregor and screenwriter John Romano ( The Lincoln Lawyer) certainly don’t lack ambition in tackling a sprawling work that many consider to be the magnum opus of an author frequently failed by cinema.
Whereas Roth expansively addressed how the “Greatest Generation” of World War II warriors saw their post-war idylls scorned and scorched by the “indigenous American berserk” of 1960s rebellion and social ferment, McGregor’s movie instead settles for being a reductive morality tale.
It’s a tale that might well have been titled The Football Star, the Beauty Queen and the Curdling of the American Dream.
The film is framed, as per the novel, with the favorite Roth device (and alter-ego) of Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn), a writer revisiting his past.
He’s returned to his rural New Jersey hometown of Old Rimrock for the 45th anniversary of his high school graduation.
Instead of the expected warm bath of nostalgia, he gets the cold shower of hearing about what really happened to Seymour “Swede” Levov, the football champ and all-round American hero whom Zuckerman revered and “from whom was expected everything.” Swede grows up to marry Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly), a former Miss New Jersey who manages to win over Swede’s outspoken Jewish father (Peter Riegert), despite his opposition to her Christian beliefs.
Swede and Dawn have an adorable daughter named Merry (played by Hannah Nordberg as a child and Dakota Fanning as a teen). Swede smoothly assumes control of his retiring father’s successful glove factory in Newark, praised for its diverse workforce.
All seems right with the world, except for a troubling stutter that Merry develops — which her psychologist (Molly Parker) diagnoses as a “strategy” for coping with a world she can’t understand.
As the idealistic Merry advances to her teen years, she becomes bitterly opposed to her parents’ bourgeois beliefs and falls in with a group of homegrown terrorists (the Weather Underground is implied).
Vowing to bring the Vietnam War home to America, the group blows up the post office in Old Rimrock, killing a man and making Merry an immediate suspect when she vanishes both from the town and her parents’ lives.
All of the above functions as mere narrative larding for the main story McGregor and Romano choose to tell: that of a father’s desperate and unceasing quest to save his daughter. It’s a defendable dramatic choice, perhaps, but it strips away much of Roth’s cultural subtext and deep character shadings.
The actors capably hit their marks but rarely illuminate the interior torment of Roth’s prose. The direction and cinematography are similarly workmanlike but unremarkable.
How does a child who grew up idol- izing Audrey Hepburn and warbling “Moon River” suddenly become a bloodthirsty killer, hating her parents and country? Why does a “perfect” couple, model and patriotic citizens both, have to endure such torment?
These are questions pertinent to current times, too. But McGregor’s take on American Pastoral offers no insights, choosing to depict righteous suffering more as an update on the Book of Job than as a thoughtful screen adaptation of a classic of modern literature.