Scottish actor Ewan McGregor makes a respectable if unimaginative directing debut with “American Pastoral,” yet another adaptation of a Philip Roth novel that mistakes a book’s plot and characters for its artistry.
McGregor also stars in the film as Seymour Levov, the son of a Newark glove manufacturer whose blond hair, blue eyes and preternatural athletic prowess earn him the nickname “Swede,” even though he’s Jewish. Swede embodies everything optimistic and wholesome about post-World War II America, right down to the Irish Catholic former beauty queen he’s taken as his bride. Swede takes over his father’s glove factory, buys a cow farm, and settles into a middle class family life that in time includes his only daughter.
Her name is Meredith, nicknamed Merry, which turns out to be cruelly ironic: As a child, she suffers from a stutter that her speech therapist connects to Oedipal competition with her beautiful mother. As a teenager, played by Dakota Fanning, she’s a tightly coiled gyre of outrage and resentment toward everything in her orbits.
“American Pastoral” tells the timeless story of a child pulling away from her parents, a journey here given a Rothian spin of Freudian psychology and cultural symbolism. But in compressing the novel, McGregor and screenwriter John Romano have lost its sweep and tricky subtleties: The story’s unreliable narrator, Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn), appears in a few scenes as he learns of Swede’s fate at a high school reunion. But rather than a complicated, refracted portrait of postwar innocence destroyed by almost biblical pain and betrayal, the film winds up being a relatively prosaic period piece of political upheaval, social dislocation and 1960s angst.
