‘American Pastoral’ Review: Ewan McGregor Mis-Adapts Philip Roth’s Novel

The Depression was over.

[...] within the first minute of “American Pastoral,” the voice of Philip Roth‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 novel becomes that of an elderly spouse explaining the plot of a movie in a crowded theater.

Directed by Ewan McGregor, who also stars as Newark, N.J., resident Seymour “Swede” Levov, the lead-footed version of Roth’s book is an object lesson in the perils of adaptation, a movie that neither expands our understanding of its source nor stands on its own.

Roth’s novel, a kind of fictional history that may or may not have been imagined by his narrative alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, becomes, in McGregor’s clammy hands, yet another tiresome movie about The Sixties, a generational gumbo whose attempts at sweep and scope only underline the production’s pinched imagination.

“American Pastoral” keeps the novel’s framing device, with Zuckerman (David Strathairn) at his 40th reunion recalling the Swede’s glory days as a high school athlete, then learning of the dark times that followed after.

Stripped of its ambiguities, the plot plays like boomer magnetic poetry: a little race riots here, an anti-war bombing there, a dash of sexual liberation and voilà!

Ideally, her critique of her parents’ upper-class complacency, their claim to be “against the war” while living their comfortable lives in a leafy Republican suburb, ought to have some teeth, but as Merry’s written and as Fanning plays her, her anger is so out of control that every word comes out through gnashed teeth.

Why do we need a movie when we already have the book? (“Because it’s shorter” is not a good answer.) McGregor’s movie is a half-hearted transcript with no heart of its own, one that commits the ultimate sin of making you wonder whether the book it’s based on could possibly be any good in the first place.