American Pastoral review – Ewan McGregor's misjudged Roth adaptation

The engaging actor Ewan McGregor has made a high-minded but misjudged and heavy-footed directorial debut in which he also stars. It’s an odd, tortured and self-torturing postwar drama hitting a note of grandiose domestic tragedy, adapted from Philip Roth’s award-winning 1997 novel, though often more resembling something by John Irving.

McGregor himself plays Seymour “Swede” Levov, a Jewish guy who appeared to have won the game of life: a high school sports star and ex-marine who came home to New Jersey from the second world war war in triumph and married Dawn, a beautiful gentile beauty queen, played by Jennifer Connelly, before taking over his dad’s lucrative glove factory. His own nickname is a playful tribute to his Wasp style of good looks and prestige.

But they have a troubled daughter, Merry, who stammers, and as the 60s come around she breaks her dad’s heart by getting mixed up in revolutionary violence and going on the run: it’s a shrill and uninteresting performance from Dakota Fanning.

This movie leaves you with a strong sense of its deeply regretful suspicion of women and young people generally: there is a cringe-makingly written encounter with a contemptuous-yet-sexy radical in a hotel room. McGregor’s performance has sincerity of a frowningly oppressive kind, but the whole thing is tinged with self-pity.