American Pastoral

Philip Roth's works, on the whole, haven't made good films. I don't know if it's just the style of Roth's works or that he hasn't good luck with directors. I believe there have been six: Goodbye, Columbus (which is probably the best); Portnoy's Complaint (I've never seen it and there seems to be no home video version of it); The Human Stain, which was just okay; Indignation; The Humbling (which I'll write about soon) and American Pastoral, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It's an American classic that was made into a lousy 2016 film.

The film was directed by and stars Ewan MacGregor, and he's the wrong fit for both jobs. The book is about a successful man, Seymour "Swede" Levov, who was a great athlete at his high school, and was worshiped by Roth's avatar, Nathan Zuckerman,  this time played by David Strathairn. When he finds out that the Swede is dead, the film shows us what happened: his troubled daughter, Dakota Fanning, got caught up in radical politics in the '60s, blew up a post office and killed a man, and became a fugitive. This shattered the Swede's American dream life and his marriage to beauty queen Jennifer Connelly.

First, some nit-picking. MacGregor does not look like anyone who would be nicknamed "Swede." When I read the book I picture someone blond and beefy, a former athlete just starting to turn to fat. MacGregor looks neither Jewish nor Swedish. Peter Reigert, who plays his father, the owner of a glove-making business in Newark, is played with over-emphasized Jewishness.

Secondly, the film explains rather than enlightens. Some things work on paper, but not on the film. For instance, a person in the film becomes a Jain, which is a religious sect that does not believe in killing anything, even microscopic organisms. In the book, Roth could explain this, in the film, the character recites facts about it as if it were a footnote.

I don't think the film, either the script or the direction, understands the '60s. I was just a kid then, but I've read extensively on it and Fanning is a shrill, one-note character who is against everything. It reminded me of the song Groucho Marx sings in Horsefeathers: "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It," which is funny and was supposed to be. The American dream destroyed by the bomb is depicted much more poignantly in the book, but in the film only has surface emotions and simplistic characters.

Several real events are shown or talked about, especially the Newark riot of 1967. In this scene, the glove factory office manager, a black woman, makes a speech to a National Guardsmen about thinking before shooting. First of all, I'm not sure that's good advice for a trained soldier, and secondly it is self-righteous speechifying at his worst. I don't remember if that's in the book, but Roth would have never written something so baldly false.

Maybe one day a great film will be made of one of Roth's books. I think Nemesis would make a good film, but no one has asked me to write it.