STREAMING ON SBS 0N-DEMAND - Barrie Pattison discovers AMERICAN PASTORAL (Ewen McGregor, USA, 2016)

Hannah Nordberg, Ewen McGregor
American Pastoral

SBS are currently fielding American Pastoral, (expires on August 31) a 2016 adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning Philip Roth novel, apparently the only film directed by Ewan McGregor, young Obi-Wan Kanobi in person. I was vaguely aware of it, though the film has mysteriously vanished from McGregor’s IMDB credits. This one was a prestige undertaking with a substantial budget and celebrity participants and it came loaded down with SIGNIFICANCE. Well OK.

What we ended up with was yet another imitation Gatsby, an attempt to document the failure of the American Dream, complete with foreground repeats of the Stars & Stripes fluttering in the breeze. It’s even got David Straithairn doing a Nick Carraway character. We start with him voice-overing a passage from Roth’s novel about his college reunion and pondering the fate of golden boy football hero McGregor, who inherited his father’s glove business and married glamorous Miss New Jersey Jennifer Connelly… and we forget about David for most of the picture.

There are problems with the achiever couple’s stuttering, then-teen daughter 12 year old Hannah Nordberg, manifesting incestuous rivalry with mom for McGregor. However she is radicalised by seeing the self-immolating Vietnamese monk on sixties TV and starts calling the cop supervising the Newark Curfew a pig and shouting solidarity slogans at black pedestrians. McGregor hangs a “We employ Negros” banner out of the company’s second-floor window. Rioters in the street put a bullet through it. Well, perplexed by this and, about the time the locals give him a plaque for his progressive attitude, Ewen finds things going pear-shaped and the daughter, now played as a star turn by Dakota Fanning, gets onto the F.B.I’s most wanted list. Ewen berates ineffectual agent Mark Hildreth  for tapping his phone.

Sexy Valorie Curry turns up, shifting from caressing one of the factory-tailored gloves to going explicit, coming on for Ewen (everyone wants to make it with him in this picture), in with demanding four-figure sums in small bills to pass on to Dakota, now a Weatherman undercover. Curry is given the shock value sex material, the explicit hotel encounter. She does get the run in with McGregor, just round the corner from the cycle cop both need to avoid. The film would have benefited from more of this elliptical handling.

The passages which do work occur in this section - Bombing victim widow Samantha Mathis’ resonant meeting with McGregor and Connelly, comparing the personal damage both their families have sustained and Ewen’s violent confrontation with assured therapist Molly Parker, whose treatment of Dakota he sees as responsible. The two actresses seem to be the only ones who have assimilated the complexity of the characters the film hands out. But there’s more - too much more.

They’ve put in time and effort in setting up plot elements that never deliver - cow-loving  Connelly guilty of her privileged life, a strong willed Catholic facing off with Jewish patriarch Peter Reigert (Local Hero) over religious education,  Mc Gregor’s fetishising the leather of his dying luxury trade, fruitless pursuit and Strathairn back at the trophy case.

Roth adaptations like Ernest Lehman’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Larry Peerce’s Goodbye Columbus are the work of people whose other films show them immersed in the American scene. Australia’s Phil Noyce bailed on this one. It would be nice to know the story there. That left rookie director, Scots leading man McGregor, facing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and knowing that its devotees would regard any changes as desecration. It would have taken steely-willed control to jettison the padding here. 

Instead, we get best traditional A feature craft - cameraman Martin Ruhe (The Americans & pop clips) offering glowing rural scenics contrasting with the grim city (“Do you walk this way every night?”), Alexander Desplat’s tasteful unobtrusive scoring and Melissa Kent’s traditional editing, with a top dollar cast in Lindsay Ann McKay’s costumes carefully derived from the Sears Catalogues of the day.

Inevitably, Hollywood’s take on Vietnam protest dominates. Think back to The Soldier Who Declared Peace, The Strawberry Statement and particularly A Small Circle of Friends, add in Hair, not discreditable attempts to put “counter culture” up front, even if seeing Robert Kramer’s 1970  “underground” Ice shades those.

Now I’ve always homed in on “trangressive” film entertainment - well savvy transgressive film entertainment - Boris Karloff, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Sergio Corbucci, Dario Argento,  Alex de Iglesia. You could add in Adam Sandler.  Leave Luis Buñuel, John Waters and Pedro Almodovar to the Art Industry. If you are up to speed on that comparison, you will understand why American Pastoral never made it into the collective memory and has to be retrieved from an Australian "ethnic TV" channel. I found it curiously discouraging.

Watch the Trailer