American Pastoral is one of the greatest books I ever read; I'm thrilled they are going to make a movie out of it, but I'm really scared since I saw what they made with "The Human Stain". Roth's novels are very hard to adapt for a movie.
Anyway, let's hope the film will be faithful to the book, not like Robert Benton's The Human Stain movie was...
I agree. American Pastoral was a brilliant book, but I hope they do it justice with the movie adaptation.
And yeah you're right again: the Human Stain was terrible.
It is impossible to experience one's own death objectively and still carry a tune
I always wonderd why "When She Was Good" was never made into a movie. Or was it?
shareI don't think there has been a greater American book in half a century. It is brilliant, emotional, intelligent, fierce -- there are not enough adjectives for it.
However, I doubt it can be filmed successfully without being reinvented. The book is about Zuckerman imagining what it must have been like for the Swede. ZUckerman's voice and imagining brings together 50 years of our culture history, the journey from a culture based on assimilation and success to one bordering on nihilism. The film will inevitably be about the events of the plot (which again, are largely imagined) and not what Zuckerman thinks of them. It's like trying to adapt Ulysses, which would wind up being nothing but shots of Bloom walking around thinking.
If they can capture what made this a great book in some cinematic way, it will be one of the greatest achievements in film history.
They can just get rid of Zuckerman, although I liked his role at the beginning of the novel, meeting his old classmates and reflecting about the past. I like nostalgia.
Tu sei la prima donna del primo giorno della creazione.
I think this will be a great movie. With a two hour time limit, it will be nice to see what this story would be like WITHOUT ALL THE POINTLESS WORDS. It's why I like movie adaptations of Henry James novels. I want to know the story, but I just can't stand to read Henry James.
To paraphrase the play/movie Amadeus: "How does one say, Herr Direktor? Too much spice. Too many words."
I used to think that Martin Luther's 95 Theses were actually seven theses reiterated several times over, but compared to Roth, old Luther was positively reticent and to the point. If most of American Pastoral was about Zuckerman's musings on what he imagined Levov's life must have been like, perhaps he needed a new muse.
Now don't get me wrong. I think Roth is a brilliant writer, but what he needs is a brilliant editor. One with an industrial-sized shredder. Or a good reader looking over his shoulder and saying "Alright, we got the point already!" A writer adding pointless scenes to fluff up the size of a manuscript is bad enough, but when the writer adds the fluff without adding additional scenes, it just gets to be too much.
About now you're thinking I made my point two paragraphs ago, but yet I am going on an on about how Philip Roth can't get on with it.
Now you know how I felt reading American Pastoral.
Wow.. that's the first and only time I've ever seen Roth criticized for being verbose. Especially since his last few books have all been novellas. I always thought his sentences were extremely compact.. but then, I'm biased and would consider him my favorite writer. Now someone like Dickens.. THAT'S verbose, but can you blame him? I'd like to be paid by the word when my novels are serialized.
Roth is just too hard to adapt into film. Did anyone see the 70s version of Portnoy's Complaint? I haven't, I wonder if it's any good. Obviously it's probably not that good..
I just finished reading American Pastoral today and I thought it was very tautly written. I found it sufficiently fast paced to read it in two days; something I am not capable of when reading verbose fiction.
There is always a point when Roth makes the same point again. Lou Levov's ranting and the obsession with tanning and making gloves is meant to evoke the obsession with the past that we have lost and the present that we can't control.
I would agree with someone who said that it won't be easy to make the same points in the film as are in the book. It is as much about the universal themes of knowing people and not knowing them as it is about America.
I agree with the poster who called this novel verbose. I read it and thought that there were just too many things taken and dropped and too many things painfully expanded. The dinner part scene was great but horrifically long I don't know why he couldn't have expanded that dinner with swede's new family instead. Comparedto portnoy's complaint the verbosity of this book is underwhelming.
shareDirector Phillip Noyce did a great job on the 'quiet american' - a graeme greene novel no less. I am pretty confident he will do a great job on this book. He is one of those directors that thinks like a writer and respects the original material.
'I just finished reading American Pastoral today and I thought it was very tautly written. I found it sufficiently fast paced to read it in two days; something I am not capable of when reading verbose fiction'
Noyce directed 'The Saint', 'Patriot Games' and 'Clear and present danger' and they all move along at a cracking pace.
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Yes, whomever said Roth is verbose, is, I believe, mistaken. To me, Roth's writing is remarkably economical.
It seems like quite a chore to make American Pastoral a 2 hour film, but it's been done before with similar novels. It will take a great screenwriter (as it always does).
Noyce has proven he can do great things with difficult material. I'm excited by this project, and hope it gets made. Phillip Roth one of our greatest living novelists.
It could be argued that this film adaptation will inherently better than "The Human Stain" because it doesn't cast Anthony Hopkins as a Black man. Just sayin'.
shareI just finished reading this book a minute ago. Took me a while to get into it, but ultimately I found it incredibly moving and recognie that this is one the great literature works of our time, hands down.
I wasn't necessarily surprised to see that the book has been optioned, albeit in 2004, but there is no way in hell that this should become a movie. There are just some books that should not be made into movies and this is one. Absolutely NO NEED!
I can't imagine how painful it would be to adapt this into a screenplay. What a tremendously difficult and maybe impossible job. This movie will never happen for many many reasons and I am okay with that.
I have heard that The Human Stain is also great, so I am moving on to that, too. Havent seen the movie of Human Stain