Considering the slim success rate adapting our literary lights, it’s a shame this worthy shot at Philip Roth’s tricky novel, with its didactic underpinnings morphing into Dickensian plotlines, came & went without a trace. Undervalued scripter Nicholas Meyer deserves kudos for goosing up director Robert Benton & for savoring those Rothian ironies: racially-charged politics, the redemptive power of love, a time fractured murder mystery; all while lifting a curtain on the personal history of his modern, middle-aged Achilles. (Fascinatingly played as a youth by Wentworth Miller.) If only the three leads weren’t so eccentrically cast. WASPy Anthony Hopkins as a Jewish prof with a secret past?, patrician Nicole Kidman as a trailer-trash Ann-Margret type?, Gary Sinise as Roth ’s alter-ego? Only Ed Harris, playing a booby-hatched ‘Nam vet, isn’t in there just to serve an OTT advertising campaign by the Weinstein brothers .
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