At a New Jersey school reunion, Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn) recalls class football hero Swede Levov (Ewan McGregor) but Jerry tells the writer Zuckerman the full story. Nathan is jewish and marries beautiful catholic Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly) despite his father (Peter Riegert)'s religious objections. He manages his father's glove factory and moves out into the country. They live a decent life and they send their stuttering daughter Merry (Hannah Nordberg) to psychiatrist Sheila Smith (Molly Parker). A teenage Merry (Dakota Fanning) turns radical over the Vietnam war.This is Ewan McGregor's directorial debut. It's probably too ambitious. His lack of experience leaves the movie missing a direction and intensity. It's an epic that is beyond his capabilities. First, I would abandon the wrap-around present day story. The stuttering is problematic. I'm sure that it's part of the novel but it stalls the conversational flow. Aside from the stuttering, some of the dialogue is clunky. This wants so badly to be shocking and emotionally sprawling. It would help to give Dawn more screen time especially after Merry's departure. The hotel scene with Rita is almost comical and Dawn should be there. Dawn's deterioration is too abrupt because the movie doesn't follow her down. Nathan is stuck in a frustrating way. By falling short, this fails through setting the bar too high.

What a strange one this is. The movie strays pretty far from the book, and plays like the weirdest episode of Mad Men never filmed. The tone is unrelentingly dour, and the point is... what? Stuttering leads to radicalization? Don't have a mixed marriage? The 60s were a bitch? It's well done, and the filmmakers' hearts were in the right place but David Strathairn as the Philip Roth character and Ewan McGregor as a Jewish guy? Nope.

When I saw the cast I really thought this was going to be a good movie but in the end it just a disappointment. It deserves an average five star rating just because of the cast. Their acting is good, so nothing wrong with that, but the story is just not interesting enough to make it a good movie. I though the character played by Dakota Fanning was extremely annoying and therefor I lost interest in the story itself. She's playing a confused young brat that I would not give one second of my time. When she was younger and still stuttering it was okay to watch. I thought the story would go somewhere but when she grows up it's just about a father searching for his daughter. It's just too slow and too boring to be good. Well at least that's my opinion.

I have seen in many ways better films. But this story has surprised me in shocking way. I feel like naked, because this could happen to me and before seeing this movie I did not know this. How unbelievably easy is to be blind and not to be aware of it in time. How difficult is to see thinks which are so different from what we are use to see.