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.