“America had won the war. The Depression was over.” Thus, within the first minute of “American Pastoral,” the voice of Philip Roth‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 novel becomes that of an elderly spouse explaining the plot of a movie in a crowded theater. Directed by Ewan McGregor, who also stars as Newark, N.J., resident Seymour “Swede” Levov, the lead-footed version of Roth’s book is an object lesson in the perils of adaptation, a movie that neither expands our understanding of its source nor stands on its own.
It’s almost hard to know where to begin the list of what “American Pastoral” gets wrong, but given that the least one expects from an actor’s directorial debut is sensitive, well-tuned performances, it’s astonishing the extent to which McGregor and his costars, including Jennifer Connelly (as Swede’s beauty-queen wife Dawn) and Dakota Fanning (as their daughter Merry) telegraph every last emotion like they’re acting in semaphore.