Home-grown terrorism, 1960s-70s style: With AMERICAN PASTORAL, Ewan McGregor directs and stars in the latest Philip Roth adaptation; Woody Allen tackles the theme in his Amazon streaming series, CRISIS IN SIX SCENES

Given how life-and-time-changing were the rather large number of incidents of home-grown American terrorism back in the 1960 &70s -- as Civil Rights appeared so strongly on the national agenda, the Vietnam War raged, protests mounted, and bombings and other assorted acts occurred (I don't think we referred to them as "terrorism" back then; they were instead "violent protests" or assassinations) -- it seems odd how little our cultural landscape, then or now, reflected this.

Considering how many movies, books and TV shows covered the Manson family and its so-much-more sensational

crimes, this lack is more than a little noticeable. We've seen a few documentaries down the decades, and we had the pretty-good TV movie Katherine (which has, since then, had its title changed to 'The Radical'), the musical Hair, of course (but that offered protest than was non-violent), and a few novels that, mostly quite after-the-fact, addressed the issues that were then at hand and quite vital to the good old USA.

One of these was Philip Roth's American Pastoral, first published in 1997, of which we now have a movie version, also called AMERICAN PASTORAL and directed by and starring Ewan McGregor (shown at right), with a screenplay adapted by John Romano. The other currently-streaming-via- Amazon cultural artifact that tackles this time period and its discontents is -- of all things -- the latest endeavor by one, Woody Allen, and is titled CRISIS IN SIX SCENES. The two works, while covering similar territory, could hardly be more different.

This is not unexpected, of course, considering the oeuvre of Mr. Allen and Mr. Roth. But comparison of both these two new "entertainments" -- having seen them in the same week, as did TrustMovies -- proves rather striking and edifying. While neither work is entirely successful, both are eminently worth seeing, mulling over and enjoying for their various strong points, which are many. American Pastoral explores terrorism and its results darkly, while Crisis in Six Scenes gives us the light and quite funny/satiric side via the usual Woody witticisms/characterizations. Both make you think and ponder nonetheless. Seen together, they add up to a particularly tasty, nourishing and worth-digesting meal.

I have not read the Roth novel, and therefore can only go by what the movie version offers. (I have read several of Roth's early works and found them sometimes funny and well-written but awfully misogynistic.) The movie, it seems to me, shows that Mr. McGregor has real potential as a filmmaker -- even if the result he has given us here is remarkably flat. But wait: It's often that very flatness that keeps us glued to the enticing and engulfing plot.

Everything is straight up and straight out, from the early exposition/narration to the individual scenes that tell and show us what we need to know. The story, of the "perfect" American family -- Dad's a high school football hero, mom's a beauty queen, and their daughter, ah, there's the catch. She's a lovely little all-American blond named Merry, with a stutter, a keen intelligence and perhaps the kind of real and all-inclusive empathy that (we're being told of late) can prove unhealthy.

In any case, Merry turns into a protester and then into a "terrorist," and the remainder of the movie details the unraveling of this family in a succession of scenes that grows darker and more unsettling, partially because we never completely learn how and why the change (or maybe growth) in Merry happened. We do get a major clue, however, in the scene with the family around the television, as one of those Vietnamese monks of the time self-incinerates himself as the world watches. Merry's reaction here is so strong, so indelible (the fine little actress, Hannah Nordberg, above, right, nails this moment) that it brings the concept of empathy to searing life. Nothing is quite the same thereafter.

If Nordberg allows us inside her character -- she does so again, in a scene that skirts the Oedipal (or its female counterpart) -- most of the other actors do not. And this seems almost purposeful, as we skate along the surface and the plot details build. Jennifer Connelly (three photos above) is fine as the beautiful wife who finds her own way of coping (though Roth's misogyny is most apparent here), David Strathairn (above) impresses, as always, as the narrator, schoolmate, and Molly Parker (below) does, as well, as Merry's double-duty therapist.

Orange Is the New Black's amazing Uzo Aduba shows us a whole new side as our hero's assistant at the glove-making factory (is she Roth's idea of the "good negro"?) that he has taken over from his aging father (the very good Peter Riegert. below). And then there is Mr. McGregor. This actor has been just fine in film after film. Here, he is perfectly OK, but it is in and through him that the flatness of the film most shows up. He's the character we're able least to get inside: Utterly passive; he reacts to everything but rarely acts on his own. While this may have been Roth's and now McGregor's intention, it does leave a kind of hole in the movie.

And yet this very hole forces us to wonder and consider everything anew. American Pastoral may leave you unsatisfied in certain ways, but I suspect your will mull it over. And maybe over again. Is this the plight of the American father and man? To have all the expectations laid out in one neat, long row? And then to have them, like those famous dominoes, fall flat? What was America's responsibility in that very unjust Vietnamese war? And how exactly does an act of political violence assuage anything? (Dakota Fanning (below, right) plays the daughter Merry grown up, and she, too, is flat but still impressive, while leaving us longing for answers, of which there will be none. And rightly so. This character's empathy is far-ranging, eternal and clearly destructive to her and those around her.

From Lionsgate -- and supposedly running a more than two-hour time frame, which now seems to have now been cut down to around 105 minutes -- the movie opens nationwide this Friday, October 21. Here in South Florida it will play the AMC Aventura 24 in Miami, Regal's South Beach 18 in Miami Beach, and the Cinemark Palace 20, Boca Raton. Click here and then click on GET TICKETS to find the theater nearest you.

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The game-changing character in Mr. Allen's new series -- quite similar in intentions and even looks (if not at all similar in style and depiction) to American Pastoral's Merry -- is Lenny Dale, played by, of all people, Miley Cyrus (above, left), who is actually good -- charming, bright and alluring -- enough to attract another important character, the also bright-but-too-buttoned-down young businessman, Alan, played by the very good John Magaro (above, right).

It is into the upper-middle-class home of TV and novel writer, S. J. Munsinger (played by Mr. Allen, above, left) and his wife, Kay (the wonderful Elaine May, above, right), that the gun-toting Lennie breaks one late night, turning the Munsinger household upside down. On the run from the law for a number of "terrorist" acts, Lennie brings up those same themes of justice, retribution, rights and wrongs.

But this, being a Woody Allen creation, uses all these same themes for lighter entertainment. The series begins, however, with a montage of 60s events -- civil rights, Vietnam, etc -- that offers ample evidence of Lennie's claims, and so, even as we chuckle and chortle throughout these six episodes, with each one lasting around 22 minutes and giving us a little over two hours of fun and games, we are still consistently reminded of what -- out there and far away from this comfortable household -- is happening to others, thanks to American policy, both foreign and domestic.

If this sounds like an odd combination, it certainly is. Yet Allen pulls it off with his usual savoir faire. His S. J. Munsiger (note the syllable similarity to a certain J.D. Salinger -- which is used for a very funny situation late in the series), offers Mr. Allen in his typically nerdy, neurotic schlemiel mode (just older here). He is as funny as ever, and his ability to satirize the 60s/70s in terms of how events effected (usually not) the comfortable middle class is very much on target.

In his large supporting cast appear everyone from Joy Behar (above, center), as one of Mrs. Munsinger's book-club attendees, to famous French comic Gad Elmaleh as one of Kay's marriage- counseling clients. (Some of her advice to these clients is very funny, if not perhaps very typical). The break-in leads to consciousness-raising, romance, and some silly but funny derring-do (below) by Sidney and Kay -- all before the everything's-gonna-be-fine finish, which seems to gather together on screen maybe half of Westchester County.

From the ever more active Amazon Originals production group, Crisis in Six Scenes is streaming now and should provide copious laughs and not a little nostalgia for the senior set. Amazon Prime members can watch it free of charge. 

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1960s protest, AMERICAN PASTORAL, CRISIS IN SIX SCENES, dark America, Ewan McGregor, home-grown terrorism, novels into films, Philip Roth, satire, Woody Allen,

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Enriching, soulful, sorrowful: James Schamus' adaptation of Philip Roth's INDIGNATION

We're nowhere near the end the year, yet all these wonderful "year's bests" keep appearing. You'd think it was December -- or at least autumn -- already: The Innocents, Captain Fantastic, Homo Sapiens, Hell or High Water (which I won't be reviewing for a couple more weeks). And now appears a new --  and for my money best -- adaptation of a Philip Roth work to yet hit the screen.

It is the first full-length film to be directed by an icon of American independent cinema, James Schamus, and what a lovely job he has done! Granted, many of us movie lovers, who have such a soft spot in our hearts for Mr. Schamus as a groundbreaking producer over decades now, were no doubt hoping for something good. But this has exceeded all our -- mine, at least -- expectations. (And TrustMovies is not a huge fan of the work of Mr. Roth.) I have not read the particular Roth novel on which the film is based, but unless Mr Schamus has changed things rather drastically, this would appear to be one of the kindest and most caring of this author's works.

I don't believe that the filmmaker has sentimentalized things, either. INDIGNATION seems more a clear-eyed and honest -- if  quiet and unshowy -- look at 1950s America, in which to be at all "other" (whether Jewish, or atheist, or a sexually-active-and-happy-about-it young woman) is to court reprobation, if not outright shunning. Fit into the groove, please. Or keep silent. Or get out of town.

Our hero, Marcus -- played with a quiet strength and masculine beauty by Logan Lerman, (center, two photos above) in what is certainly his best role yet -- is both a Jew and an atheist who has come from New Jersey to attend a posh college in Ohio (where Jews have their very own dormitory -- and are expected to join it forthwith). Olivia, the young woman he meets and is very attracted to (the also beautiful Sarah Gadon, above, who comes across here as strongly as I've yet seen her on screen), is so sexually forward that she throws our young man for a loop. But, boy, does he try to figure all this out and make things "work." (Most young people will not have a clue what it was like to have lived though the uber-conforming, sexually rigid 1950s. This movie provides as good a foundation as any.)

At odds with Marcus -- even though they would want to think quite otherwise -- are the school's Dean (a splendid job by actor playwright Tracy Letts, above) and our boy's own mother (yes, this is Philip Roth novel, after all), brought to immense life and even greater strength by Linda Emond, below. (In a smaller role, Danny Burstein plays Marcus' father as a man sadly unravelling.)

Ms Emond has a scene toward the conclusion of the film that is as strong as any we've seen so far this year. She should be a shoo-in for a Best Supporting Actress nod. The scene involves her wringing a promise from her son that is perfectly understandable -- and yet you'll want to put your fist through her face for demanding it. (This is the second great "mother" scene this year, after Noémie Lvovsky's turn in the recent Summertime.)

Dialog is vital in this movie, and so well has Mr. Schamus coaxed his cast that you'll hang on every word. There's one scene midway along between Lerman and Letts that becomes an immediate classic of its kind. Visually, too, the director/screenwriter-adaptor has done some beautiful stuff -- especially the manner in which he ties beginning and end to all that has come in between. This is a quiet movie. And yet it is so full of life that, in its own way, it surges. I would not have missed it, and I can't wait to see it again, once it hits home video.

From Roadside Attractions, Indignation, after premiering in New York and Los Angeles last week, opens this Friday, August 5, here in South Florida (and elsewhere) -- in Miami at the AMC Aventura and Regal South Beach; in Ft. Lauderdale at The Classic Gateway Theatre; in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theatres and Regal Shadowood 16; and at the Movies of Delray in Delray Beach. The film will expand into even more theaters on August 12. 

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college life, conformity, INDIGNATION, James Schamus, Nostalgia, Philip Roth, the 1950s, The Other,

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Al Pacino's back in Barry Levinson's THE HUMBLING -- for better and for worse

What a frustrating experience is THE HUMBLING, the new film from director Barry Levinson, with a screenplay by Buck Henry from the novel of the same name by Philip Roth. Interesting, sometimes riveting -- but only in fits and starts -- the film also gives Al Pacino a juicy role which he alternately embraces and makes mincemeat of. He is not helped by Mr. Levinson, who at times seems to have deliberately decided to work in distance or long shots when what is so clearly called for is a close-up (though the director might have worried that his scenery-chewing star would once again decimate the drapes). Whatever: The Humbling might be better titled, The Fumbling.

The real problem, however, is most likely due to the source material itself. I haven't read Roth's novel, but the mostly negative criticism of it -- absurd, slight, disposable, ill conceived, and simply going-through-the-motions -- also reflects the state of this movie version. Over the years, Mr. Levinson (shown at left) has excelled in a variety of genres -- from drama to comedy to horror (see his very good and frightening film, The Bay, if you haven't already). Perhaps here, working with such a problematic tale, he has simply let it "wag" him, rather than the necessary reverse. Or it may be that a movie that jumps so many genres, as this one does, is simply not part of Levinson's metier.

But let's start with the good things, including Pacino, who, even when he's over-doing it, proves fun and often funny. Given his professed love of Shakespeare and the nice job he did with Shylock, one easily identifies with the character he plays here, Simon Axler, renowned stage actor who has recently had a bad few years.

Then there's Greta Gerwig (at right), who certainly comes into her own in the role of Pegeen, a needy, messed-up adult who, as a child, had been enamored of Simon and now comes back into his life as a possible -- if highly unlikely -- love interest. Ms Gerwig plays pretty much a femme fatale (or at least a femme maudite) here, but she manages to keep us, as she does Simon, off-balance, alternate-ly charmed and annoyed.

Somewhat wasted (due to her tiny role), Kyra Sedgwyck, above, still impresses with her strength and anger, while Diane Wiest and Dan Hedeya (below, right and left, respectively) provide some humor, as well as additional back-story.

Of the entire cast, it's probably Charles Grodin (below, left) who best nails his small role as Simon's agent, followed by Nina Arianda (at bottom, right), who has the most preposterous role of all, but manages to make it seem at least possible, if not probable. The movie might have worked better has Gerwig and Arianda switched roles: The former's easy goofiness might have better served the maybe-crazy/maybe-not wife, while the latter's drive and heavy-duty acting chops might have turned Pegeen into something approaching memorable.

As it is, the movie meanders from incident to incident, emotion to emotion, stopping for something real and then something ridiculous -- finally leaving all its characters, especially Simon, hanging out to dry. The Humbling has a lot in common with another recent movie about actors and acting: Birdman, which offers fine performances, fluid camerawork and simply no point -- no "there" there -- at all. (Both films, in fact, have a scene in which our heroic actor gets locked of his theater during a performance.)

From Millennium Entertainment (recently renamed Alchemy, which had better get -- and fast -- a decent web site up and running) and lasting a little too long at 112 minutes, The Humbling, which may humble some of those involved here, opens this coming Friday, January 23, in New York City at the AMC Empire 25 -- and elsewhere, too, though nothing has yet been posted as yet on the movie's site. Check back in a few days, and maybe someone will have updated the thing. Also, as I understand it from the web site, the film will be available simultaneously via VOD and digital streaming.

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acting, Barry Levinson, Books into Cinema, Buck Henry, films about theater, inter-generational romance, Philip Roth, THE HUMBLING,

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