Review: Indignation
Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 12:18PM Manuel here with a review of Indignation, now in theaters.
Indignation is the type of film that, even if you didn’t know was adapted from a novel (by Philip Roth), you’d describe as “literary.” Part of this has to do with its dialogue which is both highly literate and thematically robust. And the other part comes from the strategically and efficaciously deployed voice overs that all but announce themselves as being cut whole cloth from a novel with a highly sophisticated narrator whose attempts at self-knowledge would be comical if they weren’t so earnestly intense.
The very first pages of Roth’s novel introduces us to Jewish student, Marcus (a wonderful Logan Lerman) as he’s rankled by his father’s sudden mistrust of him ahead of his heading to college. His father is clearly afraid for his boy—he’s seen too many of his relatives head to Korea never to come back. His pestering (and in the film, Danny Burstein gets at Marcus’s father worry as tinged by his own anticipated grief) leads him to constantly keep tabs on him, asking him where he’s been, how he can be trusted, and more pointedly: how does he know Marcus won’t go to places where he’ll get killed...
Marcus fills us in:
“The questions were ludicrous since, in my high school years, I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student who went out with only the nicest girls, a dedicated debater, and a utility infielder for the varsity baseball team, living happily enough within the adolescent norms of our neighborhood and my school.”
The map of the novel and film alike is here in whole. Once he heads to college (in Ohio, far away from his Newark neighborhood), Marcus will be faced with a world very much unlike the one he grew up in. He’ll succeed at school but there’ll be a girl—isn’t there always? And she’s not, as it should be obvious, be like those “nice girls” he’s used to.
No, Olivia (Sarah Gadon) is urbane and sophisticated—when Marcus takes her out on a date to a fancy restaurant called L’Escargot she chides him for never having tried snails. Of course, she comes with her own issues to spare. While Marcus had been a straightlaced student, we learn that Olivia is not only very comfortable blowing Marcus in the car following their first date (which leaves Marcus at a loss, forcing him to try and square off his prudishness with his inner reactionary), but is trying to leave behind a drunken past behind that had led her to have a prominent scar on her left wrist, not to mention a stay in a psych ward.
Seeing as the spectre of death and the oppressiveness of normalcy haunt the early moments of Roth’s text, you may very well know where the film is headed. Thankfully, Schamus handles the story with great care. Indeed, his opening scenes, one in an old folks’ home, the other in Korea, are wonderful choices that make the final moments of the film feel all the more brutal.
Beautifully crafted (boy can Lerman wear a sweater vest!), the film is perhaps too precious for its own good. The dynamism of the intimate scenes (say, between Lerman and the school’s dean played with aplomb by Tracy Letts, or between Lerman and Linda Emond as his mother visiting him on campus) is missing whenever the film indulges in its on the nose, if necessary, voice overs. Or as is the case in a latter part of the film, when we see a dream that feels like an attempt by the film to spell out its Themes for you lest you miss them.
Roth is one of the greatest chroniclers of postwar America (and of Jewish identity in the United States). In that respect Indignation is a success—in no small part due to Lerman’s portrayal which thankfully reminds us why he may be a talent to watch. But the film left me rather cold. Not because it’s intellectual discussions about propriety, privacy, masculinity, and identity overwhelmed the emotional core of the narrative, but because it reads like a perfectly constructed replica of Roth’s prose, exacting and accurate but almost too self-aware for its own good.
Reader Comments (6)
On a side note, was it well known fact that Logan Lerman is Drew Barrymore's kid in Riding in Cars with Boys. I watched the movie this morning and was surprised by the discovery!
The trailer for this seems unnecessarily dour and oppressive. Roth seems nearly impossible to adapt. I can't think of one successful film version based on his work. But I have been trying for decades to track down the infamous Portnoy's Complaint. I hear Karen Black is terrific.
I really like Lerman as an actor.... I am not a Roth fan, so I go in with a little trepidation.
Saw this one at SIFF with James Schamus in attendance. I enjoyed the film and the book. A lot of the audience found it unnecessarily dark, but I found it to be temperamentally sound. I thought Lerman did a fantastic job, and I adored Linda Edmond, especially the cautionary scene in the hospital. Self-sacrificing without drifting to dramatics. Tracy Letts was also good, but I feel he could've done those scenes in his sleep.
The trailer is totally misplaced. Makes it feel even more heavy than it is.
Hate to be the one to ask, but any chance of Oscar nominations - for Tracy Letts in Supporting Actor, or for Adapted Screenplay?
manuel, enjoyed your review. i thought the movie was heavy-handed and dull. there's nothing dramatically at stake, and that olivia character makes zero sense. james schamus is such an amazing producer but no filmmaker.