Most actors, when crossing over to the other side of the camera for the first time, opt for something small scale – see Casey Affleck's I'm Not There – or for something that feels like an extension of their personality – see Tommy Lee Jones gnarled neo-western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada or Angelina Jolie's sincere Bosnian war romance In the Land of Blood and Honey. So fair play to non-Jewish, non-American Ewan McGregor for going off-script to take a crack at Philip Roth's 1997 Pulitzer prize-winning novel.
Roth's fiction has previously been mangled and bowdlerised into such unlovely movies as The Human Stain. And American Pastoral – a highly regarded allegory that could just as easily have been called America – is an even more unwieldy, superficially unfilmable prospect.
Unsurprisingly, the debuting director and his screenwriter John Romano struggle to escape the daunting shadow of the source material. Chunks of the novel are preserved, as if pickled, in voiceover, as Roth surrogate Nathan Zuckerberg (David Strathairn) returns to Newark for his 45th high school reunion.
In conversation with a former school chum, the bookending alter-ego discovers that Seymour “Swede” Levov (played by McGregor), one time local sporting hero, second World War veteran and heir to a glove-making empire, has recently died, but not before his family were torn apart by counter-cultural frictions.
The veteran Scottish actor draws great teary, angst-ridden performances from co-stars Jennifer Connolly et al. Composer Alexandre Desplat compliments the emotional pyrotechnics with one of his most bombastic offerings. Inserted archive footage goes some way to compensating for the novel’s wealth of historical details. DOP Martin Ruhe works hard to create vistas that might have been painted by Edward Hopper.
Despite a great deal of pruning, there’s enough of a central narrative plank (what’s a parent to do when their child gets mixed up with bomb-making revolutionaries?) to hold the film together. Some of the edits for the big screen – getting rid of fat as a form of protest – seem unwise. Others – secondary characters and subplots – are entirely necessary.
It’s far from perfect, but it’s not a bad stab at tricky material.
