Review of American Pastoral (2016) by Spangle — 16 Feb 2017

Ewan McGregor's ambitious adaptation of one of the best novels of the 20th century is admirable and nearly makes the grade, but simply feels neutered. Adapting Philip Roth's American Pastoral and doing it justice would be a challenge for any director. For McGregor to decide to take it on as his directorial debut is admirable and shows courage, something desperately needed for directors. Unfortunately, for future follow-ups, adapting an easier and less complex novel may be advised, for fear of McGregor's directorial career turning into James Franco's. A beautifully written novel, Roth's American Pastoral could be turned into a film, but this is not the film. It lacks the nuance, the grace, and poetry of Roth's prose and replaces it with nothing substantial. In spite of the reviews, it is a crushing disappointment to see the film turn out to be largely quite plain.

Using Roth's famous Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn) to introduce us to this tale of despair and the loss of the American dream experienced by Seymour "Swede" Levov. The quintessential American boy, the Swede was a star athlete in high school. Nathan, best friend of the Swede's young brother Jerry (Rupert Evans), reminisces about the now deceased Swede with Jerry at their 45th high school reunion. With the Swede having married Miss New Jersey Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly) and having a beautiful girl named Meredith "Merry" Levov (Dakota Fanning), to go along with the leather glove factory left to him by his father to run, the Swede had it all. He had the perfect love. Beautiful life. Great daughter. Terrific job that let him interact with all of the people he grew up with in a career he had a great passion for. Yet, things for the Swede when his beautiful, but stuttering daughter grows into a leftist radical in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. Painting a mosaic of life and these defining images of the era, Roth created a gorgeous vignette of a novel that showed the quintessential American man have the beautiful facade of his life blown away. In the same breath, he paints a brilliant conceived allegory of America through the Swede. With his infrastructure blown away in the 1960s with his child revolting against the world he had built, his world continues to crumble when nostalgia kicks in for his wife and she wishes to be young once more. An entrepreneurial son of an immigrant, Swede Levov is America and America is him, in all of its gritty and dark details.

McGregor does a tremendous job capturing this and exploring those themes introduced by Roth. But, the film feels far too rushed and, again, neutered. It explains these themes, but spells them out to you. The connections and themes are explained through narration at the end by Nathan Zuckerman that largely forces him the points of the novel and the film about how we can never truly understand somebody, no matter how perfect their life seems from the outside. Life is not nearly that neat and all is not what it seems. Rather, the facade of American life was broken in the 1960s and the white picket fence found in the wreckage of the wasteland created by the Vietnam War and ensuing riots. The film simply lacks the nuance of Roth's novel and does not paint this cohesive painting of horror and beauty that permeates the novel. It a film that simply feels cut-off and runs like a highlight of the best scenes from the novel with no connecting thread. This lack of nuance comes from McGregor's inexperience most likely with scenes ending too soon or new ones being added to the novel that serve the sole purpose of explaining what happened.

That said, there is still some brilliance on display here is translated from Roth's novel. Again, McGregor does a good job keeping Levov as an allegory for America as a whole. Setting it against these wars and riots is what makes this novel so crucially important and what got it the Pulitzer Prize. Yet, crucial to the tale is Merry. Brought to life by Dakota Fanning, Merry is a very Freudian little girl. In love with her father sexually, she wants him to kiss her life he kisses Mommy. When he refuses, she does two things. One, she deepens her hatred of Dawn for having the Swede's sexual attention. Two, she begins to hate her father for rejecting her advances. What ensues is her spiraling out of control and taking things too far. She acts out through joining anti-war subgroups, violently cursing out Lyndon B. Johnson, and soon becoming an anti-war terrorist bomber that has killed three people. She is a girl that argues everything is political, but for her, everything is sexual. This is all derived of her perceived rejection and prior lust for her father and anger to her mother. As they define America and quintessential products of the American dream with youthful good looks, she seeks to destroy them. How do you destroy a nation? Revolution, bombs, and shattering their innocent image of you. She does this to perfection as she bombs the post office and runs off.