“American Pastoral” is a period piece, a piece of Americana and a literary adaptation.
[...] the Philip Roth novel of the same name is tonally difficult to convey onscreen, somewhat extreme — not farce, not black comedy, but pushing at the edges of naturalism.
“American Pastoral” is an earnest film, a well-acted film and, despite the presence of a star director, a generous film.
The 1997 novel — part of Roth’s remarkable late flowering of significant work — is, in the best sense, an old man’s story, a looking back on the past with ruefulness, clarity and a frank appreciation of life’s mystery.
Told as a recollection by Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn), the movie looks back on the story of “Swede” Levov, a high school sports hero admired by everyone in middle-class Jewish Newark, N.J.
[...] financially well off, he turns his family’s glove-making business into an even bigger success, and he buys a sprawling farm in the suburbs.
The movie is unclear as to the origins of the stutter, whether it’s just one of those things that would clear up on its own, or whether it’s an expression of some tension within the family.
[...] something does seem off — either within the family dynamic or the little girl’s psyche — when she asks her father one night to kiss her the way he kisses Mommy.
“American Pastoral” is about the unraveling of dreams, about how things sometimes happen that seem random and capricious and even absurd and yet they can drain away all the sweetness from life and leave people, in middle age, looking around like mute witnesses.
The film never finds the right note of strangeness or madness to go with the sadness.
