American Pastoral

2016

108 mins

Directed by Ewan McGregor
24%
31%
Drama

An American businessman's upper middle class life is thrown into turmoil in this 1960s domestic drama. Ewan McGregor's directorial debut,... More

An American businessman's upper middle class life is thrown into turmoil in this 1960s domestic drama. Ewan McGregor's directorial debut, which adapts Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and stars himself and Jennifer Connelly.

"The film's elegant framing device introduces Seymour's (McGregor) former classmate, and Roth's inveterate alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn). At a high-school reunion, Zuckerman catches up with Seymour's brother, Jerry (Rupert Evans), and discovers the remarkable tale of his old friend. A successful businessman with a happy family, Seymour's life begins to slide off the rails when his teenaged daughter, Merry (Fanning), becomes radicalised in reaction to the war in Vietnam. Soon she rejects her family's comfortable existence for a secret life of violent protest."

"Through a combination of Jerry's disclosures and Zuckerman's own recollections of his fleeting encounters with Seymour, a complex portrait is gradually constructed, one that speaks to the experience of not simply one man, but rather of an entire generation struggling to comprehend the dissolution of a dream." (Toronto International Film Festival)

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American Pastoral is available to stream in the United Kingdom... More now on Amazon Video and Apple TV Store and Google TV and YouTube.

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American Pastoral | Ratings & Reviews

24_%123 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes® rating
31_%2,642 reviews
Audience score rating

"Ewan McGregor's directorial debut is as flat and strangled as Philip Roth's novel is furious and expansive."

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Variety

"Adapting Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was always going to be a tall order for any director. In first-timer Ewan McGregor's hands it's entirely unwieldy."

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Total Film

"It's a remarkably committed effort that takes a few seriously misguided turns along the way, even as its actors lunge at psychological depth with every scene."

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Time Out

"Not a desecration but a severe diminution of a complex literary masterpiece."

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The New York Times

"McGregor's performance has sincerity of a frowningly oppressive kind, but the whole thing is tinged with self-pity."

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The Guardian

"A haunting, engrossing, often eerily timely adaptation. It's a movie that makes you think and feel - and then think some more."

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Los Angeles Times

"The filmmaking is prosaic when it should crackle with tension and disruptive undercurrents ..."

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Hollywood Reporter

"It's hard to begrudge such an earnest endeavour, but this is missing the wit, nuance, and insight of a book thought by many - correctly, maybe - to be unadaptable."

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