‘American Pastoral’ DVD Review: True To The Plot, But Sorely Lacking In The Message

American Pastoral, a crime-drama movie directed by Ewan McGregor, is based on the 1997 novel of the same name by Philip Roth. It stars big names like Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Riegert and the director McGregor himself.

‘American Pastoral’ DVD Review

Both the book and the movie follow the story of Seymour “the Swede” Levov (McGregor), an all-American family man who watches his family disintegrate during the tumultuous 1960s. The story is told from a flashback at a 40-year reunion of the graduating class of Weequahic High School in New Jersey.

Swede is a former high school star athlete who married Miss New Jersey, with whom he has a daughter, Merry (Fanning). Merry grows up with stutter, and also develops a resentment against everything her good-looking, suburban parents stood for. By the time she reaches high school and the Vietnam War is raging, she’s become radicalized and frequently partakes in antiwar protests. A few days layer, a local post office and gas station are blown up by a massive bomb, killing the gas station’s owner. Merry becomes the prime suspect in the bombing, and she soon disappears.

The main purpose of the Pulitzer-winning novel was to explore the nature of nostalgia and myth-making, but the movie adaption misses this by a mile, and then some. The novel is narrated by Roth’s alter ego, a fictional character named Nathan Zuckerman. In the film, however, first-time director McGregor mostly omits Zuckerman, one of the book’s key elements. Though Zuckerman (David Strathairn) is still a character in the film, his purpose was altered, and in changing that role, the film misses what American Pastoral is really about.

The movie mistakes the plot of the novel for its story. It is faithful to the plot of the book, but misses the point of the book entirely. In the book Swede’s tale gets jumbled up with Zuckerman’s nostalgia, with his imaginations of how his childhood hero could fall into the pits of tragedy. Zuckerman fictionalizes his tale by necessity, thus preventing Swede’s life from becoming a strained metaphor.

In the movie, however, Zuckerman is merely there to bump into Jerry Levov (Rupert Evans) and listens as Jerry recounts the tale. This leaves the movie feeling flat and insignificant, lacking the novel’s energy and ambition. Without Zuckerman’s narration, the crucial mythmaking component vanishes.

Some scenes in the film are beautiful, with expansive and stylized backdrops that capture the scenes of rural life in the 1960s. Its depiction of the riots that rocked Newark in the 1960’s, however, is lacking: it reduces the violence to simple street scuffles, and newsreel footage barely covers the magnitude of the events. The movie seems to have misunderstood its source material, leaving out its most central themes of reminiscence and mythmaking.

Check out the movie trailer below: