Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "American Pastoral" has been brought to the screen unsuccessfully by its star, Ewan McGregor, in his directing debut. It gears up to go important places but never arrives.
Roth is a grandmaster of intellectually dense fiction. His works, full of emotionally complex relationships, often have been radically trimmed to dramatize in two-hour chunks. The resulting movies need to be assessed not on their connection to the original but how they work on their own terms.
Veteran producer/screenwriter James Schamus handled the adaptation challenge masterfully this summer in "Indignation," a 1950s coming-of-age saga about a promising student whose East Coast Jewish upbringing clashes with his entry into a staunchly Christian Iowa private college. McGregor's film, in which the American dream of post-World War II idealism becomes chaotic Vietnam-era despair, covers darker dramatic territory much less effectively. (Full disclosure: I've read my fair share of Roth, but not the 1997 novel on which the new film is based.)
The motifs of "American Pastoral" are familiar to Roth devotees: Jewish-American life, the personal impact of politics, male nostalgia for less diverse times, lustful sex scenes, untrustworthy women and little hope for harmony between the genders. The Scottish McGregor, speaking in a droning, slightly whiny American accent that grates the ear, plays Seymour "Swede" Levov, a fair-haired high school sports icon adored by his fellow students.
The film begins with David Straithern as a novelist returning for the class' 45th reunion, surprised to learn that Swede has died and that, as recounted by his brother, his outwardly perfect life was a tragic mess. The rest of the story flashes back through Swede's imagined point of view and the writer's narration, a metaphorical approach that may work on the page but makes the film feel dubious from the start.
Swede is presented as a perfect mensch, a brave war veteran, loving husband to Dawn (Jennifer Connelly as a gentile former Miss New Jersey) and devoted father to Merry (played in her teenage years by Dakota Fanning). He's a successful entrepreneur, boosting his father's leather glove business into a growing concern. His home is a serene ranch where Dawn keeps horses. All is well until the young Merry reveals an incestuous attraction to Daddy, telling him to "kiss me like you'd kiss Mother." He gently but firmly declines.
As a consequence of her anxiety, Merry begins acute stuttering, growing ever more remote and rebellious. As the TV news delivers ongoing imagery of slaughter in Vietnam, she adopts radical attitudes that sound like the rhetoric of bomb-flinging domestic war protesters. Then the nearby gas station fatally explodes, and Merry disappears. Whether she was responsible for the bombing is a question Swede and Dawn spend years trying to answer, confronting many social and personal issues along the way.
While McGregor is a gifted performer, he shows no skill as a filmmaker; he's incapable of directing even himself to a good performance. Connelly's character has a mental breakdown scene that is almost surreally lurid. Fanning's stutter-step dialogue is never believable, miles below Brad Dourif's turn as young Billy Bibbit in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Valorie Curry appears as possible contact with the long-absent Merry, acting as tawdry as a film noir hussy. The entire cast delivers the stuff of cheap melodrama. Unlike Roth's rich fiction, the film has only a passing likeness to the way actual humans live and interact with one another.
