[yasr_overall_rating]
In 1968, a hardworking man, who’s been a staple in his quaint community for years, watches his seemingly perfect middle class life fall apart as his daughter’s new radical political affiliation threatens to destroy their family.
Cold and cutting, Jennifer Connelly’s character Dawn, burns through her husband Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov (Ewan McGregor), with quiet rage proclaiming she is, “a princess in a madhouse,” and it is all his fault. Ewan McGregor’s all American, a rep for all that is “good” in the moral fabric of America, Swede sits there across from his ailing wife and takes it. He takes it with just a hint of pain riddled across his face. It’s peculiar. It’s lifeless. It’s dead wood. It’s one of many scenes that should seethe with passion, venom, and panic but dies an instant death; completely lacking, completely less than. What should have captured the implosion of postwar middle class America, simply becomes a pale imitation of a Sirk film.
Based on Philip Roth’s Pulitzer winning novel, “American Pastoral” focuses on the destruction of a man’s family, unveiling the illusions of American bliss. Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov is your prototypical American everyman: football star, war veteran, businessman, and family man. He is charming, kind, and endearing. He’s a Jewish man married to a Catholic beauty queen with a precocious daughter afflicted with a stutter. Dawn and Merry are his world. His world is simple until it comes crashing down around him. He’s left choking on all of what he has known to be the “good” of America, as the youth, including his politically radical-minded daughter, has quite literally blown it to shit. Kind of like how McGregor has blown “American Pastoral” to shit.
I have nothing against Ewan McGregor. I generally enjoy his work but he just didn’t seem human in this film. No one seemed human. It was as if everyone were a paper doll, only moving when forced by a hand ignorant of the ways of finesse. Jennifer Connelly is stunning to gaze upon and her moment, her unraveling, is the only instant where I was nearly moved. Dakota Fanning as Merry is a stilted performance, but I am still on the fence whether it comes down to her abilities as an actress or whether she’s just a casualty of a bad adaptation. The ultimate sin, the death knell, of “American Pastoral,” is the film’s original soundtrack. How someone as brilliant as Alexandre Desplat can compose music that cheapens an already bad film is beyond me. It lays the melodrama on thick, making it hard to swallow.
This could have been a beautifully and powerfully nuanced film, but it lacks the delicate touch needed for it to be so. It is a film that should have been like the whistling of a bomb falling, a tension built up in the gut, a primal panic before doomsday. But it was like a chunk of lead clunking with a dull predictability. Ewan McGregor’s “American Pastoral,” may have been easier to bear if it hadn’t decimated the value of a great piece of literature, but I doubt it.
In theaters Friday, October 21st
