Saw it cold (hadn't read the book) and found it fascinating

Thank you talkinhorse for your thoughts, based on your post alone I will probably go and see this film.

I also went into it not a fan of the casting or having read he novel and I enjoyed it. It's a solid 7/10 film and better than a lot of the reviews it got.

I'm so glad you enjoyed it!

The book is a messy, brilliant masterpiece, with sprawling scenes (key dialogues, such as Dawn and Lou when she has to fight Lou for the Swede's hand, or the Swede and Mary's conversation about Jainism) that would have taken 3 or 4 times as long in the film if they had included even half the dialogue. The structure of the novel consistently keeps you off kilter; non-linear doesn't begin to say it. Entire sections of the novel are triple layered unreliable narrators, with The Swede narrating Dawn's breakdown, as told to The Writer at the reunion by Jerry. All three characters have their own agendas and their own subjectivity, so we truly have no idea what Dawn is "actually" going through.

And that's the point.

The theme that we are all character's in the stories each of us tells about the world, and that we all get each other wrong (or do we...? Are other people sometimes right about us, and we're deceiving ourselves?) is explored in this novel perhaps better than any other that I've ever read. So you can imagine the weight that I felt walking into the film adaptation. Would any of the deeper ideas come across?

I found the film excruciatingly stilted and awkward. But it occurred to me that my memory of the novel was so intense, that I couldn't form a proper opinion about the film as a film. Overall, I thought that Mary's radical politics, and their family dynamic, just wasn't all that convincing in the film, which made the story's emotional heart--The Swede's horrifying tragic connection that just won't die with his daughter--less powerful. In the novel, Mary comes across as aloof to the point of being maddening, creepy really, in her Jain stage. In the film, when she intones the lines about not doing harm to the water or the air, I thought she just sounded ridiculous.

But I found myself wondering - what would someone who had never read the book think? it's still a pretty off-beat and powerful story. So I'm glad that you liked it, and I'm sure that many others will, too. It seems to me that, in reading your post, some of the deeper ideas did indeed come across, particularly about how we never truly know why people, even (perhaps especially) the people closest to us, do anything.

I haven't read the book either, but the movie's story was by far the most powerful part thanks to master writer Roth's novel most likely. I thought the film was clumsy, but the acting and plot powerful.