American Pastoral (2016)

At a New Jersey school reunion, Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn) recalls class football hero Swede Levov (Ewan McGregor) but Jerry tells the writer Zuckerman the full story. Nathan is jewish and marries beautiful catholic Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly) despite his father (Peter Riegert)'s religious objections. He manages his father's glove factory and moves out into the country. They live a decent life and they send their stuttering daughter Merry (Hannah Nordberg) to psychiatrist Sheila Smith (Molly Parker). A teenage Merry (Dakota Fanning) turns radical over the Vietnam war.This is Ewan McGregor's directorial debut. It's probably too ambitious. His lack of experience leaves the movie missing a direction and intensity. It's an epic that is beyond his capabilities. First, I would abandon the wrap-around present day story. The stuttering is problematic. I'm sure that it's part of the novel but it stalls the conversational flow. Aside from the stuttering, some of the dialogue is clunky. This wants so badly to be shocking and emotionally sprawling. It would help to give Dawn more screen time especially after Merry's departure. The hotel scene with Rita is almost comical and Dawn should be there. Dawn's deterioration is too abrupt because the movie doesn't follow her down. Nathan is stuck in a frustrating way. By falling short, this fails through setting the bar too high.

Really! Talented people choose to be in this Show? I watched it all the way through because of the actors. I assumed at some point their would be a story worth watching. I would be wrong. And in the end, someone phoned in the ending because they didn't care either. I would like anyone from this movie to contact me and either explain why they did it or apologize to me personally.

The reasons I decided to watch this.Ewan McGregor's debut as a director. - Jennifer Connelly.I gotta admit, I'm not familiar with Philip Roth or his work. At all. My understanding of his status in American literature of the 20th century is superficial at best. Having said that, I'm convinced (without ever having read the book) that the movie leaves a lot of stuff out from the book. That is why I can only rate this slightly above average. The actors are doing their job, but there's a lot missing here. Many questions unanswered. Many highly improbable outcomes in relation to the daughter and her upbringing, emotional state, actions etc. Starting with not overcoming her stutter, voluntarily or not. Most of the story defies logic in every way. That girl had everything growing up, but instead of wanting to create, she decided to destroy which to me is inconceivable. And no, that scene where the father rejects her in the car and the one where she witnesses a Tibetan set himself on fire on television aren't enough to fundamentally change her and turn happiness into bitterness at a young age. Just doesn't cut it. All in all a nice effort for a first feature. 6.6/10

'I was never more wrong about anyone in my life.'Philip Roth's superb book has passages of language that crystallizes our thinking, our memories, our association with life. In this cinematic transformation the words are placed in the utterances by Nathan Zuckerman, sort of an Everyman as he states in the opening of the film – 'Let's remember the energy. America had won the war. The depression was over. Sacrifice was over. The upsurge of life was contagious. We celebrated a moment of collective inebriation that we would never know again. Nothing like it in all the years that followed from our childhood until tonight, the 45th reunion of our high school class…30 or 40, a gathering of my old classmates would have been exactly the kind of thing I'd have kept my nose out of. But at 62, I found myself drawn to it as if in the crowd of half-remembered faces I'd be closer to the mystery at the heart of things, a magic trick that turned time past into time present'. John Romano adapted Roth's novel American PASTORAL for the screen. Ethan McGregor directs. We all reflect on a time that somehow, though placed in the 1960's resistance against the Vietnam War, is terrifyingly familiar with the mood of the nation at present, again at resistance rallies – and that is the reason it works so well.Seymour 'Swede' Levov (Ewan McGregor) was from the Jewish community and is an All- American sports star in high school. He had everything an American idol can dream of - a the tall muscular young man and high school star athlete but he married a Catholic beauty queen named Dawn (Jennifer Connelly) against his father's (Peter Riegert) advice. Swede later became the successful manager of the glove factory his father had founded, which allowed him to live with his wife in a beautiful house in the New Jersey countryside. Well-mannered, always bright, smiling and positive, conservative but with a liberal edge, what bad could ever happen to him? The couple's stuttering daughter Merry (Hannah Nordberg then Dakota Fanning) is their pride and joy until she steps into the 1960s and becomes an antiwar activist, responsible for bombing a little station, killing the owner in what is a senseless and horrifying change in life direction. Merry leaves home and the rest of the film is a father's search for peace with his distraught wife and community while he ceaselessly searches for his renegade daughter. A difficult film to watch, just as the book was challenging to read. But somehow the mirror it holds up to society as we are currently living it makes the disturbing experience all the more poignant.