Bring out the Bomb Squad; Noyce’s American Pastoral Adds Some TNT in Dakota Fanning

They’ve shuffled the deck a little on Philip Roth’s American Pastoral since the project was first announced a decade back. Jennifer Connelly who was mentioned more than a decade ago along along with Phillip Noyce just signed on, and now Dakota Fanning is moving from exploding potential dams (Reichardt’s Night Moves) to playing with more TNT taking on the role of Merry (originally slated for Evan Rachel Wood). Filming takes place in Pittsburgh, next March.

Gist: Scripted by John Romano, Seymour “Swede” Levov (McGregor) is a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory – comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. He grows up to marry a former beauty queen (Connelly) and inherits his father’s business. Swede’s seemingly perfect life shatters when his daughter Merry (Fanning) rebels by becoming a revolutionary and commits a deadly act of political terrorism during the Vietnam War. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizens, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history.

Worth Noting: Fanning has been an indie darling as of late — working with the likes of Amy Berg (Every Secret Thing – Tribeca ’14), Andrew Renzi (Franny) and Gerardo Naranjo’s untitled project — which are all highly anticipated  2015 titles.

Do We Care?: One of the most critically lauded novels of the naughts, Noyce who is one of the better helmers to adapt book material for the big screen, has a assignment ahead of him. A decade of prep time should help.