Free | 23/6
Posted: 5/31/2012
It's finally, really happening.Philip Roth's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'American Pastoral,' often considered the 79-year-old legend's masterpiece, is being made into a movie. After years of dithering by various Hollywood executives who'd purchased the adaptation rights, it's now in the capable hands of producer Tom Rosenberg, the head of production company Lakeshore Entertainment, who won a Best Picture Oscar for 'Million Dollar Baby.' When it's released -- hopefully in fall of 2013, Rosenberg told the Huffington Post -- it'll be the third Philip Roth novel he's brought to the big screen. We Roth fans should be excited right now. But it's hard not to feel some trepidation. Rosenberg's other two Roth adaptations were mixed successes at best. The first, 'The Human Stain,' was widely criticized for its dicey casting -- people were upset to learn that Anthony Hopkins was playing protagonist Coleman Silk, a professor nursing tortured feelings about his African-American heritage. Critics liked the second, 'Elegy,' an adaptation of the Roth novella 'The Dying Animal' starring Penelope Cruz and Sir Ben Kingsley, somewhat more, but it made less than $4 million at the box office.Let s hope the third time will be the charm, because 'American Pastoral' is a really, really good book. It's on Time magazine's list of the 100 best novels published since 1923 for a reason. There's something about its plot -- the story of Seymour 'The Swede' Levov, whose idyllic life in a posh suburb in northern New Jersey is shattered by a (spoiler alert!) shocking act of terrorism -- that makes people feel protective of it. Thankfully, Rosenberg is one of those people. 'You get a certain attachment to things that you feel compelled to finish,' he said. 'And this is one of them. It's not his trilogy, but it's sort of my Roth trilogy,