American Pastoral (2016)

Don't Believe the Hype

Beautiful, moving film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The daughter looks to be about age 7 in 1963 when she sees the Buddhist monk burning on TV. At most 5 years pass when she is watching Lyndon Johnson on TV and she looks like she's aged 30 years. (She could only have aged 15 years since Dakota Fanning playing her was 22.) And an old and ugly 30 years at that. Such carelessness shows in the rest of this horribly written and acted excuse for a film.

Some reviewers are disappointed that it didn't live up to the category of psychological family drama or missing person crime thriller and I wonder if this movie even BELONGS in either category; and really why does a movie have to fit any category? If you go into an experience with a boxed in expectation, nothing done will satisfy you. I sat down to watch this film not even knowing that Fanning was in it and that's how I like it. Personally, I thought the daughter was born to be more sensitive to the world than others; I was quite like her when I was a young child and still am. Swede and his wife, Dawn didn't take the stuttering seriously enough and didn't believe that it was emotions driven. You have parents who know that they are special and to a child this self-knowledge might put them in a place of feeling inferior, that she cant live up. That's how i saw Merry. All the hurt she felt turned to a general hate of the world, and she gravitated to like- minded people in a very confusing time for our country and a very vulnerable time for Merry. I told my son, I would have let her go as soon as I heard that she was suspected in the first bombing. The fact that neither parent could even fathom their Merry being involved showed me just how lofty of an opinion they had about their child and themselves. The moment I really came to that realization is when I truly understood why Merry did what she did. The mental breakdown of Dawn really surprised me and the face lift thing...it further proved how I felt about the family. When Swede finally finds Merry and she is living as a Jain in an abandoned house; here's where the movie awkwardly weird for me. Fanning didn't do a good job in her acting. I just didn't believe her in these scenes. She's Dakota Fanning in makeup to me. I was left a little confused about the role of Rita and how she knew so much about Merry only to discover in that moment that she was never sent by Merry and it fell flat. What was the point of it? When both ladies decided to get out this revolutionary thing they were involved in, "broke ties" how is that Rita knows where she works and even what she now does for a living. I now want to read the book because I suspect that the book to screenplay didn't go well. This movie has made me sit and think and want to talk to my son about it, who watched it a while back. That is what a good movie should do, not quench some desire to figure out what category it belongs in. I didn't care for the ending. So much was left undone about this movie. For Swede to die, leaving us to wonder about the holes in this film and for Merry to wait until the end of the funeral, but now wait for everyone to leave...is she coming back into their lives?? If so, why would she needed to wait until her Daddy died?

I have seen in many ways better films. But this story has surprised me in shocking way. I feel like naked, because this could happen to me and before seeing this movie I did not know this. How unbelievably easy is to be blind and not to be aware of it in time. How difficult is to see thinks which are so different from what we are use to see.

'I was never more wrong about anyone in my life.'Philip Roth's superb book has passages of language that crystallizes our thinking, our memories, our association with life. In this cinematic transformation the words are placed in the utterances by Nathan Zuckerman, sort of an Everyman as he states in the opening of the film – 'Let's remember the energy. America had won the war. The depression was over. Sacrifice was over. The upsurge of life was contagious. We celebrated a moment of collective inebriation that we would never know again. Nothing like it in all the years that followed from our childhood until tonight, the 45th reunion of our high school class…30 or 40, a gathering of my old classmates would have been exactly the kind of thing I'd have kept my nose out of. But at 62, I found myself drawn to it as if in the crowd of half-remembered faces I'd be closer to the mystery at the heart of things, a magic trick that turned time past into time present'. John Romano adapted Roth's novel American PASTORAL for the screen. Ethan McGregor directs. We all reflect on a time that somehow, though placed in the 1960's resistance against the Vietnam War, is terrifyingly familiar with the mood of the nation at present, again at resistance rallies – and that is the reason it works so well.Seymour 'Swede' Levov (Ewan McGregor) was from the Jewish community and is an All- American sports star in high school. He had everything an American idol can dream of - a the tall muscular young man and high school star athlete but he married a Catholic beauty queen named Dawn (Jennifer Connelly) against his father's (Peter Riegert) advice. Swede later became the successful manager of the glove factory his father had founded, which allowed him to live with his wife in a beautiful house in the New Jersey countryside. Well-mannered, always bright, smiling and positive, conservative but with a liberal edge, what bad could ever happen to him? The couple's stuttering daughter Merry (Hannah Nordberg then Dakota Fanning) is their pride and joy until she steps into the 1960s and becomes an antiwar activist, responsible for bombing a little station, killing the owner in what is a senseless and horrifying change in life direction. Merry leaves home and the rest of the film is a father's search for peace with his distraught wife and community while he ceaselessly searches for his renegade daughter. A difficult film to watch, just as the book was challenging to read. But somehow the mirror it holds up to society as we are currently living it makes the disturbing experience all the more poignant.