Philip Roth’s fiery 60s Newark on low heat with American Pastoral
First, the half-good news about Ewan McGregor’s streamlined screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral: The movie is not a desecration but a severe diminution of a complex literary masterpiece. This shallow but watchable gloss on a book that conjures a searing image of the disintegrating American dream in the 1960s, especially as it pertains to Jewish identity and aspiration, amounts to not much more than a dutiful checklist of scenes from the novel. And its elegiac tone omits Roth’s bitterly sarcastic humour.
John Romano’s screenplay is at least true to the book in telling the story of Seymour Levov (McGregor), a Jewish high school golden boy and star athlete from Newark. The Swede, as he is called, marries Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly), a gentile goddess and former Miss New Jersey with whom he lives an idyllic life among the gentry on a farm in western New Jersey.
A humane liberal, he runs his family’s glove factory in Newark, where he is proud to provide jobs to a workforce that is 80% black, a level he tries to maintain even as the city explodes in the 1967 race riots. He is a caricature of normality.
The dream unravels when his brilliant but troubled daughter, Merry (played as a child by Hannah Nordberg, and as a young woman by Dakota Fanning), forsakes the family to join a radical Weather Underground-like terrorist cell. She disappears after helping to organise a bombing in 1968 of a general store near the farm that leaves one man dead.
The story is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn), Roth’s long-time alter ego, after he meets the Swede’s rambunctious younger brother, Jerry (Rupert Evans), at a 45th-anniversary high school reunion and learns that the Swede, his teenage idol, died of prostate cancer at 68. This narrative framing device, which works in the book, feels awkward and unnecessary in a movie that doesn’t have the time to dig inside its characters or explore their relationships.
There are a few strong scenes. The furious arguments between the Swede and his daughter before her disappearance are the closest the film comes to capturing the irreconcilable generational strife of a half-century ago, with Fanning’s chilling tone of moral superiority echoing the extreme left-wing rhetoric of the era. But the Vietnam War is just a footnote in a movie so condensed it falls back on the hoariest soundtrack cliché: Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth to evoke counterculture dissent.
The main storyline traces the Swede’s desperate search for Merry. When he is close to giving up hope, he is visited by Rita Cohen (Valorie Curry), a mysterious and sinister go-between from his daughter’s revolutionary cell who taunts him with the hope of seeing Merry, then humiliates him by playing the sadistic temptress. They momentarily set the film ablaze.
Much of the book’s power lies in Nathan’s bitter retrospective disquisitions on the Swede. But without these knotty meditations, the film’s intellectual meat is stripped away, leaving only bones, gristle and a few scraps. The Swede comes to life as an aggrieved father but not as an idealist whose beliefs are shaken to their core.
As the film gallops along at a pace that squeezes most of the salient plot details into a scant 108 minutes, no time is allowed for the sombre reflections that give the novel a tragicomic dimension. It doesn’t help that American Pastoral was filmed in Pittsburgh. The prosaic cinematography and editing give it the look and feel of a drab television movie.
American Pastoral is McGregor’s directorial debut, and he made the unwise decision to star as the Swede. For all his talent and good looks, McGregor lacks the physical stature that the role demands. At no point does he exude the charismatic, largerthan-life glamour of an athletic superman.
In the woefully inadequate depiction of the riots that devastated Newark in the late 60s, the violence has been reduced to angry street scuffles.
Newsreel footage of the actual unrest barely scratches the surface of events. Connelly’s Dawn registers primarily as an unhappy wife who snaps herself out of a depression through plastic surgery. And Jerry, the rambunctious, much-married key to Nathan’s understanding of the Swede, is here and then gone.
Still, American Pastoral leaves a residue of dread and despair that is oddly in keeping with today’s moment of uncertainty following an ugly presidential campaign. In the language of Nathan, the Swede “had learned the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense”.