American Pastoral

American Pastoral

On two separate levels, “American Pastoral” is a colossal failure. First and foremost, as a 1997 Philip Roth adaptation it’s lumbering and bungling. John Romano’s screenplay treats the story in a way that suggests nothing so much as an intentional misreading of the book but even divorced from its source material, “American Pastoral” doesn’t work.

It’s a period piece without any sense of place, one whose sense of time is conveyed exclusively through vintage store knickknacks and thunderingly on the nose musical choices. It’s a movie that strands its excellent cast in a series of emotional scenes that seem to have almost no connection to each other, despite the linearity of the narrative; Jennifer Connelly, Peter Reigert, Dakota Fanning, Uzo Aduba and Molly Parker all do strong work here for naught.

The man at fault for this is the film’s director and male lead (and erstwhile Obi-Wan Kenobi), Ewan McGregor. He plays Seymour “The Swede” Levov, whose life seems blessed until his troubled teen daughter Merry (Fanning) plants a bomb in their rural Jersey general store, kills a man and goes on the lam during the social upheaval of the American ’60s.

In Roth’s novel she does this in Nathan Zuckerman’s head; The Swede tells his sad story to Zuckerman (played here by David Strathairn), who spins an account about the industrious Newark Jews of his youth who did right by everybody until they couldn’t anymore. The Swede was one such person: A star high school athlete with light hair and blue eyes (hence his nickname), he joined the Marines when he didn’t have to, took over his father’s glove business instead of going pro or some such thing.

There were some acts of rebellion: Marrying Dawn (Connelly), a Gentile beauty queen. But for the most part The Swede’s was the kind of life you think of when you refer to “the American dream,” and Roth is very specific about what that means to an American Jew. Merry’s bomb in this movie is strictly business, its specifics so clumsily rendered that it might as well have been a pie in the face: The Swede moves through the mud at her feet, things blow up behind her, she cackles maniacally.

We’ve seen this before we saw it three years ago when Danny Boyle made “Trance” but then we didn’t have to see it again. Such is not McGregor’s way; he walks us through every step of The Swede’s wade into and out of the muck.

That McGregor should attempt such an impersonation himself would be folly enough; his political statements aside, one could argue there’s no more all-American dad than Obi-Wan Kenobi. That he chose to make his directorial feature debut with this material is curious to say the least. (There are rumors kicking around now that Harvey Weinstein re-edited this movie without McGregor’s participation or approval.

This neither explains nor excuses why it was made in the first place.) His opening scenes are handled with a certain baseline competence; Strathairn shows up at a high school reunion and runs into Rupert Evans as Jerry Levov, The Swede’s younger brother, who here wears terribly unconvincing old-age makeup.

Next come some flashbacks to The Swede’s high-school glory (played by David Whalen) and then McGregor himself steps in as young adult Swede, taking Dawn over Lou’s knee at dinner (“I’m glad you’re going out with a shiksa!”) before presenting his beauty-queen sweetheart to cantankerous dad Reigert for real. So far, so adequate. Then we land in Old Rimrock, which is where things start to go south. “We can live where we want,” The Swede proclaims. “This is America.” Alexander Desplat’s score starts sounding like phoned-in Aaron Copeland around this time.

McGregor lingers on shots of the Newark skyline from a car window, then cuts to The Swede spending his first nights with Dawn in a tony hotel that looks out on the same shot, only it’s back-projected shamelessly into their room not once or twice but three times, presumably for emphasis.

This will not be the last instance of McGregor thinking he needs to underline something for us; see also the Hamlet reference that keeps occurring in connection with The Swede’s father and brother, and as many different occasions when Merry literally screams at him in slow motion during one of her post-arrest visits home.

The final moment of this movie is so bewildering that I felt compelled to ask my colleague if she’d seen what I thought I’d just seen; suffice it to say that McGregor may want to re-read Roth’s closing paragraphs more closely (if not re-think his own). You’re welcome?

Roth’s book is more complicated than most descriptions of it would have you believe. After the first few chapters, where Zuckerman tells what he knows about The Swede and his life, the rest of the book is Zuckerman making up things about The Swede and his life. It’s a meta-narrative thing, and it goes a long way toward fleshing out characters who wouldn’t make sense in a “realistic” narrative.

One such character is Rita Cohen, a young radical who contacts The Swede after Merry goes on the lam, and tortures him with radical rhetoric and overheated sexual playacting. Rita makes sense as a Zuckerman projection: as an actual character in this tragedy, she does not, but Romano and McGregor present her that way anyway (Valorie Curry works hard to make her credible).

By the time Rita shows up, though, you’ve heard too many false notes to appreciate the true ones. Like an argument between The Swede and Merry (Fanning) about politics that’s undercut by Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” a song that has now lost all meaning whatsoever as a signifier of the ‘60s or anything else.

Similarly, the movie downplays their father-daughter relationship Merry throws away only one sullen “I hate you!,” they never fight over Vietnam in order to have her rebel by playing Jefferson Airplane records too loud in her room. Romano’s scenario gives more heft to the character of Dawn (played by Jennifer Connelly), but turns her into something closer to hateful harridan. People who accept the contemporary caricature of Roth as misogynist might not believe it, but Dawn is both less sympathetic to herself/myopic than she was in the book.

That usually impeccable actor David Straithairn portrays tragic ironist Nathan Zuckerman here as a straight across the plate Man of Gravitas should tell you all you need to know about this movie.

Movies that adapt literary works can only succeed through a dual process of distillation: the work in question has to be reduced (arguably) to fit into a time slot and head space that literature does not impose, and the book author’s vision has to be replaced by an equally valid vision coming from the filmmaker. “American Pastoral” can muster no such vision; it is a movie that finds its makers way over their heads historically, politically, aesthetically.

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