American Pastoral (15.)
Directed by Ewan McGregor.
Starring Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connolly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Reigert, Rupert Evans, Molly Parker and David Strathairn. 126 mins
Ewan McGregor's first bash at being behind the camera is a perfectly respectable but largely lifeless skim read of one of Philip Roth's most celebrated novels. Swede (McGregor) is a high school legend, one of the greatest college athlete who marries a beauty queen (Connelly), takes over his father's (Riegert) business and seems to be the embodiment of American post war contentment. All is well till the late sixties when his daughter (Fanning), disgusted by the war in Vietnam, rebels against her comfortable life and joins the radical underground and their terrorist activities.
So now I know what happens in American Pastoral. (Or at least some of what happens – the Wikipedia synopsis suggest some important omissions.) I might have gotten round to reading it one day but I don’t have to worry about that now. The film suggests it might have been a good read, but when the events are simply laid out in front of you like this, there's little chance of replicating what was compelling about these characters and situations in the novel.
It seems like the film is being slowly whittled away in post production: the running time when I saw it was at least 20 minutes shorter than the 126 minutes I was expecting. I understand the desire to shorten but every snip is reducing the impact and making Roth's themes seem simplistic. The daughter, Merry, has a stutter and the way the film is plotted it makes that stutter seem like a symptom of extreme mental imbalance. The film's framing devise is a high school reunion where author Nathan Zuckerman (Strathairn) meets Swede’s brother. After he hearing the story he concludes that what we have learned is that people are never what they seem to be, which is a reasonable thought, but it seems ridiculous that a great novelist would be shocked by one of the oldest dramatic clichés around - that the all-conquering high school jock’s subsequent life should prove less than perfect.
McGregor's direction though is competent enough. He stepped in when the original director, Philip Noyce, left the project and I don't think he's let anyone down. He gets good performances from the rest of the cast and himself, and the production looks nice. He never though remotely convinces as American Jew, not even one whose looks are atypical enough to earn him the nickname Swede.
Directed by Ewan McGregor.
Starring Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connolly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Reigert, Rupert Evans, Molly Parker and David Strathairn. 126 mins
Ewan McGregor's first bash at being behind the camera is a perfectly respectable but largely lifeless skim read of one of Philip Roth's most celebrated novels. Swede (McGregor) is a high school legend, one of the greatest college athlete who marries a beauty queen (Connelly), takes over his father's (Riegert) business and seems to be the embodiment of American post war contentment. All is well till the late sixties when his daughter (Fanning), disgusted by the war in Vietnam, rebels against her comfortable life and joins the radical underground and their terrorist activities.
So now I know what happens in American Pastoral. (Or at least some of what happens – the Wikipedia synopsis suggest some important omissions.) I might have gotten round to reading it one day but I don’t have to worry about that now. The film suggests it might have been a good read, but when the events are simply laid out in front of you like this, there's little chance of replicating what was compelling about these characters and situations in the novel.
It seems like the film is being slowly whittled away in post production: the running time when I saw it was at least 20 minutes shorter than the 126 minutes I was expecting. I understand the desire to shorten but every snip is reducing the impact and making Roth's themes seem simplistic. The daughter, Merry, has a stutter and the way the film is plotted it makes that stutter seem like a symptom of extreme mental imbalance. The film's framing devise is a high school reunion where author Nathan Zuckerman (Strathairn) meets Swede’s brother. After he hearing the story he concludes that what we have learned is that people are never what they seem to be, which is a reasonable thought, but it seems ridiculous that a great novelist would be shocked by one of the oldest dramatic clichés around - that the all-conquering high school jock’s subsequent life should prove less than perfect.
McGregor's direction though is competent enough. He stepped in when the original director, Philip Noyce, left the project and I don't think he's let anyone down. He gets good performances from the rest of the cast and himself, and the production looks nice. He never though remotely convinces as American Jew, not even one whose looks are atypical enough to earn him the nickname Swede.
