American Pastoral Review: Ewan McGregor Doesnt Do Philip Roth Justice

The better the book, the worse the movie that sad-but-true rule has few exceptions. And American Pastoral, first-time director Ewan McGregors calamitous take on Phillip Roths Pulitzer-winning 1997 novel, is awful enough to cement the rule in stone. McGregor and screenwriter John Romano misread the novel at every turn, draining it of life, power and purpose. Curiously, the Scottish actor-turned-filmmaker has miscast himself in the lead role of Seymour Irving Levov, a Jewish athlete from Newark, New Jersey, who is nicknamed the Swede because of his Nordic good looks blond hair, blue eyes, strapping build. The man is indisputably handsome, but otherwise constitutionally alien to all things Swede. It throws the movie off right out of the gate.

In post-war America, Swede had it all: school football hero, Marine vet, gatekeeper of his fathers glove factory with a staff thats 80-percent black, suburban-mansion owner, husband to shiksa beauty queen Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly) and devoted dad to stuttering teen Merry (Dakota Fanning). Shes the perfect daughter until, well, she isnt and to Roth, Merry reps the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when militant groups like the Weathermen took violent action against the conflict in Vietnam by bringing the war home, baby. That means bombs, detonated in the heart of the good old USA. And when Merry participates in blowing up a local post office (killing the proprietor) and takes refuge with a radical cell, Swedes world falls apart.

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In the mythic reach of his novel, Roth contrasts the false optimism of life after wartime with Jewish assimilation, race riots and a political fanaticism that finds current relevance in Isis terrorism. Not that McGregors film notices; by trying to shove Roths epic vision into a two-hour cinematic translation. hr reduces the film to an outline and the actors to cardboard cutouts. Nothing resonates, not even a reunion of father and daughter that plays as predictable when it should be shattering.

Look, its not that all Roth novels are DOA at the multiplex: This year, screenwriter-turned-first-time director James Schamus made something fresh and vital out of the authors 2008 novel Indignation. But American Pastoral, Roths magnum opus, needed a film revolutionary on the order of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu or the Coen brothers to re-imagine it for the screen. McGregors timid approach does no one any favors, including Roth and especially the audience.