Purely Joyful Movie!

Lack of good storyline.

How sad is this?

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

There's not one authentic moment in this entire film. Nobody captures the richness of Jewish speech, humor, or warmth. The Sixties are never convincingly brought to life, and the characters are all misrepresented. In Roth's novel the Swede is strong, handsome, athletic and charismatic -- more John Wayne than Woody Allen. He's a man of stature. In the movie he's a doormat (what we used to call a schlemiel) and everyone walks all over him. In the book daughter Merry is an ugly duckling and even her own father finds her repulsive. In the movie she's played by Dakota Fanning, a genuinely arresting screen presence who looks smart and chic even when she's lounging around in cast-off military jackets. Neither the book nor the movie creates characters you can like or care about, but at least in the book there's a certain amount of barbed humor and acid social commentary. The movie is never funny, except when it's trying to be tragic and profound. Watch the scene where the Swede "apologizes" to the family of the man killed in his crackpot daughter's bomb blast. Watch the way McGregor just sits there staring at the widow and her little boy. Watch the way the little boy just sits there, staring at the man whose daughter just killed his daddy. Watch the kid's eyes. They are blank, totally blank, and the scene goes on for about five minutes. Nothing happens, just a little boy sits there and looks empty-eyed. For five minutes. While Swede hems and haws and says nothing much at all. It's painfully clear that this director never directed a film before, but the irony is that there was material here for a real classic. The themes and underlying atmosphere of American Pastoral are not so different from Legends of the Fall. A well-meaning patriarch tries to shelter his child from the evil of the world, only to find his world destroyed by the choices his child makes. The problem is that a putz like Swede Levov just doesn't hold the audience's attention. And his wife looks stupid walking around with a cow!

The daughter looks to be about age 7 in 1963 when she sees the Buddhist monk burning on TV. At most 5 years pass when she is watching Lyndon Johnson on TV and she looks like she's aged 30 years. (She could only have aged 15 years since Dakota Fanning playing her was 22.) And an old and ugly 30 years at that. Such carelessness shows in the rest of this horribly written and acted excuse for a film.

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.

What a strange one this is. The movie strays pretty far from the book, and plays like the weirdest episode of Mad Men never filmed. The tone is unrelentingly dour, and the point is... what? Stuttering leads to radicalization? Don't have a mixed marriage? The 60s were a bitch? It's well done, and the filmmakers' hearts were in the right place but David Strathairn as the Philip Roth character and Ewan McGregor as a Jewish guy? Nope.