First, there’s a wider encapsulation of civil unrest, religious persecution, cultural upheaval, and the rise of radical terrorism during the 1960s. Then there’s a character-based domestic drama touching on more specific issues such as parenting, self-image, nature versus nurture, and the pressure of living up to expectations.
Those ideas are thrown together with admirable intent but minimal conviction in American Pastoral, an evocative but emotionally distant adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Philip Roth.
Told largely in flashback, the story recounts the life of Seymour “Swede” Levov (Ewan McGregor), a former star athlete in high school who winds up taking over the successful glove manufacturing firm run by his devoutly Jewish father (Peter Riegert).
Swede marries a beauty queen (Jennifer Connelly) with a penchant for agriculture and settles into a middle-class lifestyle. Their daughter, Merry (Dakota Fanning), is precocious and strong-willed, with a severe stutter and a dangerous interest in violent antiwar extremism.
When Merry goes missing after a small-town tragedy for which she’s blamed, Swede becomes obsessed with finding the truth behind her whereabouts. The resulting search takes him to some dark places and threatens to tear apart his relationships to both his wife and daughter in his effort to prove that parental bonds trump everything else.
It’s an ambitious directorial debut for McGregor that flashes promise behind the camera, although the muddled screenplay by John Romano (The Lincoln Lawyer) stumbles in translating the material from page to screen.
It struggles to depict the mostly internalized conflicts for its characters as the family comes apart, which tends to mute the suspense. The film compensates by funneling its story into a more conventional structure that lacks broader insight into the sociopolitical undercurrents of the era it depicts.
Give the film credit for not indulging in excessive sentimentality as it waxes nostalgic. And as the focus tightens, there are some powerful moments along the way. The strong performances include some terrific supporting work from Fanning and Riegert.
American Pastoral is mildly unsettling, but generally lacks the depth and complexity of the novel. The subtle, haunting quality of the source material is largely absent from a film that can be admired more for its effort than its execution.
