The trailer for the movie adaptation of American Pastoral is out, and if you know the book—to many people’s minds, including mine, Philip Roth’s greatest novel—you might have been wondering how first-time director Ewan McGregor was planning to adapt it. How would he attempt to mimic the gentle dissolution of the book’s framing narrative, in which Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman constructs the story from childhood memories and a conversation at a high school reunion? Would the film, which premieres Oct. 21, find within the tragedy of high school baseball star Seymour “Swede” Levov the whole history of Newark and its suburbs and, indeed, of the American middle class? What cinematic equivalent would McGregor find for Roth’s meticulously impressionistic evocation of an entire golden life, somehow at once vividly immediate and saturated with nostalgia and tragedy?
If the trailer is any indication—well, who knows? They cut the trailers to get people into the theaters, I guess, and maybe Roth’s achievement, the simultaneous conjuring of present experience and mnemonic hyperrealism and self-consciously novelistic reflection, isn’t what sells tickets. Maybe what sells tickets is what this trailer points to: the story of an ordinary man, his daughter, and the bombing of a small-town post office set against the backdrop of an America spiraling out of control at the end of the ’60s. Which is almost what the book is about, kind of, if you squint.
That first shot, though. You’re not supposed to see the post office blow up. Zuckerman imagines Levov imagining the post office blowing up. Not the events themselves but the way they manifest to us.
So, if the trailer is any indication, this will be a nicely shot period drama with some meaty scenes for McGregor and co-stars Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Connelly to show off their acting chops. With a Pulitzer Prize–winning source novel to give it some real luster! A few people could end up getting Oscar noms out of this, at least, if it doesn’t totally tank.
