American Pastoral
Directed by: Ewan McGregor
Written by: John Romano - Based on the novel by Phillip Roth
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Reigert, Uzo Aduba, Valerie Curry, Rupert Evans, David Strathairn, Ocean James, Molly Parker
Crime/Drama - 108 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 Oct 2016
Written by: John Romano - Based on the novel by Phillip Roth
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Reigert, Uzo Aduba, Valerie Curry, Rupert Evans, David Strathairn, Ocean James, Molly Parker
Crime/Drama - 108 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 Oct 2016
Philip Roth’s novel, American Pastoral, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and made Time’s “Greatest 100 Novels of All Time” list. The film adaptation will make no list unless it is a summary of actors trying their hand at directing for the first time or lackluster print to screen transformations. In a story I feel like cinema has arduously already explored, let us watch as the Vietnam War and the social/cultural upheaval it spawned back home tragically rips apart a loving, nuclear family. Imagine Ewan McGregor as John Wayne in The Searchers whose obsession with finding his runaway, fugitive daughter destroys his marriage, domestic life, and mental well-being. I have no doubt Roth’s novel is as poignant and moving as everyone says it is, but McGregor’s first foray behind the camera inspires more groans of agony than of ecstasy.
Break American Pastoral into two parts. Part One is rainbows and sunshine. In post-war, 1950s America, Jewish high school football star Seymour “the Swede” Levov (McGregor, Miles Ahead) marries Irish-Catholic Miss New Jersey beauty queen Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly, Aloft). Swede takes over his father’s wildly successful glove-making factory in downtown Newark, settles down in the rural suburbs, and fathers Merry (Dakota Fanning, Night Moves), a precocious and loving daughter. The family tends to a handful of cows on their mini-farm, and from the outside, appear to have it all representing the American Dream.
Break American Pastoral into two parts. Part One is rainbows and sunshine. In post-war, 1950s America, Jewish high school football star Seymour “the Swede” Levov (McGregor, Miles Ahead) marries Irish-Catholic Miss New Jersey beauty queen Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly, Aloft). Swede takes over his father’s wildly successful glove-making factory in downtown Newark, settles down in the rural suburbs, and fathers Merry (Dakota Fanning, Night Moves), a precocious and loving daughter. The family tends to a handful of cows on their mini-farm, and from the outside, appear to have it all representing the American Dream.
Where Part One is all bright colors, sunshine, and optimism, Part Two is grey, drab, and real. With the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, we now know these idyllic, Hallmark families from the ‘50s and early ‘60s were not as happy as they appeared. The Swede is ‘The Greatest Generation’ personified; he hires local minorities to staff his factory, he loves his wife, and he down right treasures his daughter who becomes his world’s centerpiece. The real world and its changing norms and identities sweeps the Swede off his feet; Swede is unprepared for everything outside his window such as racial tensions, teenage attitudes, and the American conscience to take an abrupt left turn.
Adapted by John Romano, who played around with similar themes in the American Dreams TV episodes he wrote, nobody can deny he successfully pulls the rug out from under the audience as well. As we observe Merry digest the daily Vietnam body counts and monks set themselves on fire on TV, her worldview shatters and she sees her country, lifestyle, and parents in a new light. Merry has no idea about the end goals, but she knows revolution is the means and her stale, overprotective parents are part of the problem. They are ‘The Man’ keeping real ideas and movements down.
Merry is far from the only ‘60s teen to get wrapped up in protest and radical ideas, but she goes a dozen steps further and may or may not have blown up the local post office killing a man along with it. Why Merry would take such brutal actions is a mystery, especially to Swede. This is his little girl the FBI is talking about. She was raised without any adversity. She has a stutter, but as foibles go, that’s mighty low on the list. Swede suggests she was brainwashed or this whole scam is a set-up; his darling Merry is incapable of savagery. She idolizes Audrey Hepburn for goodness sakes!
Merry is far from the only ‘60s teen to get wrapped up in protest and radical ideas, but she goes a dozen steps further and may or may not have blown up the local post office killing a man along with it. Why Merry would take such brutal actions is a mystery, especially to Swede. This is his little girl the FBI is talking about. She was raised without any adversity. She has a stutter, but as foibles go, that’s mighty low on the list. Swede suggests she was brainwashed or this whole scam is a set-up; his darling Merry is incapable of savagery. She idolizes Audrey Hepburn for goodness sakes!
Coping with the fallout and Merry’s ensuing disappearance, Swede and Dawn take separate roads. The Swede maintains his sharp moral compass and soda straw perspective on tracking down his daughter. Dawn’s mechanisms are 180 degrees different. She breaks down emotionally, alters and erases history in her mind, and stoically moves forward changing her appearance both inside and out. Crucially, these events are not all from the Swede’s point of view. Dawn gets her say and garners her share of sympathy; if Merry wants to blow holes in the world, why waste time finding someone who obviously does not want to be found?
A few minor characters pop up and we get the feeling they were much larger figures in the novel. Uzo Aduba (Orange is the New Black) as Swede’s faithful and pragmatic factory forewoman has nothing to do, Valerie Curry (Blair Witch) as Merry’s go-between with her family is so over-the-top she may want a slight do-over to dial it back a bit, and David Strathairn (Louder Than Bombs) as the narrator commenting on who he thought the Swede was versus who he turned out to be is an odd way to get the audience into the film. It may all come together in the novel (a phrase I fear I am overusing), but taking advantage of the narrator’s extremely tenuous connection to the Levov family does not work that well on screen.
Director of Photography Martin Ruhe (Run All Night) adeptly separates American Pastoral’s two parts and noticeably has a bit of fun doing it. Toward the end of Part One, the family is gathered together in their field, smiling from ear to ear, laughing, and the sun shines so bright it spurs a lens flare. Cut to the dining room after the bombing and Ruhe creates what may be the harshest lit dining room in cinema history. A glaring overhead lamp makes it look interrogation-like while everything just beyond the lightbulb is pitch black. Shot in Pittsburgh, not Newark, the glove factory and urban blight seem real enough but McGregor didn’t so much make me sad about a family’s disintegration or nostalgic about what a misguided war did to the country; it surprisingly scared me. I mean, if the Swede and Dawn cannot raise a child without her turning to secrets and hatred, what chance do the rest of us have?
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