Toronto (Canada) (AFP) – “American Pastoral,” Ewan McGregor’s film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, offers a grim look at the turbulent 1960s — and stark parallels with US society today.
The “Trainspotting” star is making his directorial debut with the film, which premiered at the Toronto film festival.
The film constructs a complex portrait of a man — and of a generation — struggling to comprehend the collapse of a value system during a time of great upheaval, from the tumult of 1968 to outrage over the Watergate political scandal in the early 1970s, and how that ripped apart the seemingly ideal American family.
It chronicles the life of a high school all-star athlete Seymour “Swede” Levov (McGregor) who marries a beauty queen (Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly), and has a daughter, Merry, played by Dakota Fanning.
Swede has a seemingly perfect life.
But it comes apart when Merry is radicalized in response to the Vietnam War, and rejects her family’s comfortable existence for a secret life of violent protest.
“It’s the unraveling of the American Dream,” Uzo Aduba, best known for her role as “Crazy Eyes” on the Netflix television series “Orange Is the New Black,” and now starring in her first feature film as a worker in Swede’s garment factory, said of this difficult chapter in US history.
In 1968, public opinion shifted against the Vietnam War. A wave of grief spread over the assassination of peace proponent Martin Luther King Jr., which turned to rioting.
Two months later presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles, and the nation became numb.
Richard Nixon would become the next American president touting a “law and order” crackdown in mostly black and poor urban cores.
– Parallels with today –
Now, racial turmoil has once again flared up over police shootings of African Americans.
Governments are struggling to prevent Western youths from traveling overseas to take up arms for the extremist Islamic State group.
And Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump is campaigning on a platform that includes a pledge to crack down on illegal migrants from Mexico, and a proposed ban on Muslims entering the country.
Toronto film festival co-director Cameron Bailey said the film, “arriving as the world grapples with a new period of chaos, offers a bold vision of history that doubles as a mirror to the present.”
The film also stars David Strathairn, Molly Parker and Valorie Curry, who is also appearing at the festival in “Blair Witch.”
Fanning said she hadn’t initially seen those similarities. Rather, she only considered it during filming “in the context of the time the movie takes place,” the actress added.
As the youngest cast member — born in 1994 — she described trying to relate “the best that I could using the script and the words on the page.”
“Now I think I have more of a perspective on it and a lot of people have mentioned the parallels between now and then and how this film perhaps highlights those parallels,” Fanning said.
“With any film, you just hope that it moves someone, it makes them feel something, it starts a conversation, whatever that may be, it changes someone’s opinion.
“So if this film does that for someone in the context of today, I’m happy about that.”
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