A rocky literary love story
McGregor, Connelly share love for basis of new film, Roth’s American Pastoral
Ewan McGregor and Jennifer Connelly radiate wholesomeness onscreen as a mid-century American married couple in American Pastoral. McGregor’s earnest glove factory owner has a smile that warms the screen like sunshine. Connelly’s lady of the manor is a master-class in grace.
It’s the kind of only-in-Hollywood marriage that is too good to be true, as the film soon emphasizes when their teen daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning) takes her political beliefs to extremes, exposing cracks in the family and taking the postwar American Dream down with them. Offscreen, McGregor and Connelly vibrate with such different energies it’s to their credit they made a convincing onscreen couple at all.
On the ninth floor of the Ritz-Carlton the morning after the film’s TIFF premiere, McGregor bounds into his suite and whips open the room’s curtains to brighten the space before launching into the project’s long history.
McGregor, Connelly and Fanning had been attached to the film for years as directors came and went and financing coalesced and collapsed. Connelly had originally tried to make the film with her husband, Paul Bettanny. It wasn’t until McGregor agreed to direct that the film moved forward.
In her room, Connelly is regally still as she stares out the window, cocooned in a blue knit turtleneck cape over a short white skirt. She speaks eloquently on the source novel, Philip Roth’s 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner, and its critique of a football captain and a beauty queen living on a picturesque hobby farm.
“What is wrong with that life?” she asks emphatically at the climax of a five-minute, uninterrupted analysis. “Was there something reprehensible in this idea to live that life? Were they culpable?”
As different as the actors appear, there are a few commonalities. Both are decades deep into celebrated film careers. Connelly’s breakout role came at the age of 15, when she starred in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth opposite David Bowie., who died this year
“He was so kind to everyone who worked on that movie,” she recalls, blue-grey eyes glistening. “He set such a wonderful example for me. He became a hero of mine.”
She also happens to be a huge fan of his music. “We play this game in our house called the Blind Test where we play a little bit of music and the first person to guess the artist (wins),” she says. “My daughter, who is 5, likes to play, but the only two artists that she knows are Damon Albarn and David Bowie. Just to show you how much we actually still listen to David Bowie.”
McGregor just wrapped the sequel to his own breakout film, Trainspotting. Though he’s worked with masters including Danny Boyle, Baz Luhrman, Tim Burton and Ridley Scott, he always secretly longed to direct himself.
American Pastoral’s producers “put their trust in me, which I will always be grateful for,” he says.
His first challenge was to persuade Fanning and Connelly to stay on board.
“I was nervous,” McGregor recalls. “I had met Dakota before I knew I was going to direct. We had coffee and we got on very well.
“I went back to meet her and said, ‘I suggested I direct the film and I can only imagine you playing my daughter.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ It was not a big deal.”
Having faith in her director was especially vital for Connelly, whose character arc entails a showy psychological collapse. Asked how she knew she could trust McGregor, Connelly says she’s learned to embrace the uncertainty of her profession.
“You never know how things are going to turn out,” she admits. “Before you make them, while you’re making them, after you make them. I just try to throw myself into it and invest myself as fully as I can in every circumstance.”
She was especially captivated by the character of Dawn, who is crowned Miss New Jersey, only to find the title an unwelcome shorthand that people use to define her. “She tries to run away from it for many, many years and lives on a farm and raises cows and is committed to her daughter, and has a good, simple life in the country, shovelling sh--,” she says. “And still people see her as someone who is fake and someone who has no authenticity.”
Connelly, herself a frequent contender on “most beautiful” lists, related to the role. “I felt a lot of compassion for Dawn,” she says. “I found her very interesting and heartbreaking.”
McGregor says it was the story’s portrayal of a father losing his daughter that resonated with him. “It really touched me because I am a father of four girls, so it grabbed me by the heartstrings,” he says.
He couldn’t have been more satisfied with the results. “This is the film I wanted to make,” he said when he first screened it.
Connelly’s in agreement with her onscreen husband that the film captures the ambiguous tension of the novel. “I love the novel,” she says. “I like the adaptation of it as well.
“It is its own separate thing, but it has many of the elements that I love from the novel. I think it’s a powerful story.”