Delayed Reaction: American Pastoral

The Pitch: Ewan McGregor is a New Jersey Jewish businessman trying to keep his life together in the '60s until his daughter blows it up.

I don't read many books before the movie comes out. It's only happened a handful of times and I don't like it. The two forms are very different. Not better or worse. Just different. When a book is adapted into a movie (or the opposite - movie novelizations aren't all that great) it's changed. For short stories, plot might be added. For novels, plot might be trimmed. Occasionally, the whole narrative conceit can't be pulled off visually. Regardless of the cause, the movie is almost always missing something.
I read American Pastoral a number of years ago because I was curious about Phillip Roth and it won him the Pulitzer. The book is fine. I missed some of the point of it at the time, but I liked it. I was excited to hear that it would be made into a movie, mostly because I liked the cast (Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning) and it was McGregor's directorial debut. I didn't expect it to be a great adaptation, but I was hoping it would be interesting.

I'll say this much. The American Pastoral movie is execution without inspiration. It looks like what I imagined when I read the book. The 60s don't look romanticized or sanitized, although the lens of the camera tries to make things look picturesque whenever it can. That's fitting with the tone of the book. It's a story about a shattered American dream, after all. It's a pretty literal adaptation. The plot is there. The meaning isn't. I remember hearing an interview with McGregor about the movie in which he made it sound like he only directed it because he might as well do it. I didn't get the sense that he was passionate about directing it. Now that I've seen the movie, that's sounds about right.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend