Logan Lerman, Sarah Gaddon
“INDIGNATION” My rating: B
110 minutes | MPAA rating: R
As a producer and/or writer of most of Ang Lee’s films, James Schamus has established a reputation for intelligent — even intellectual — filmmaking.
Now the CEO of Focus Features has made his directing debut, and as you’d expect from the man who wrote an entire book about one of the most confounding and polarizing films ever — Carl Theodore Dreyer’s emotionally arid “Gertrude” — it is brainy, challenging and not a little perplexing.
“Indignation” is based on Philip Roth’s 2008 novel, and a more faithful adaptation can hardly be imagined. Even to the point of duplicating things in the novel that have little hope of working on film.
Logan Lerman (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Fury”) is Marcus, a New York Jew who has landed a scholarship to Winesburg College in Ohio.
The year is 1951 and as long as he remains a student in good standing, Marcus can avoid the draft that is gobbling up his childhood friends for Korean cannon fodder. Staying in school is, for all intents, a life insurance policy.
But he finds Winesburg’s middle-American ethos and white Protestant outlook disconcerting. For starters, Marcus is assigned a dorm room with the only other two Jews on campus who aren’t members of the Jewish fraternity. These three individualists — one is probably gay, the other antisocial — form their own little ghetto.
And then there’s the weekly chapel requirement, which demands that all students show up to hear the campus chaplain drone on about Jesus.
Here’s the thing about Marcus. Though he knows relatively little of the real world — he’s a virgin, he’s never worked outside his father’s butcher shop — he’s a borderline genius. And with that comes a degree of arrogance and, well, indignation at the way he’s being treated.
Things look up when he meets blonde coed Olivia (Sarah Gadon), whom he takes to a fancy dinner (Escargot! This son of a kosher butcher has never dreamed of such excess) and who rewards him afterward with a matter-of-fact blow job.
Marcus is so stunned, his moral compass so bent by this experience that he immediately ends the relationship. Although he can’t resist standing outside her dorm late at night trying to find Olivia’s window.
Tracy Letts
Meanwhile, Marcus’ relationship with his roomies soon comes to blows and he moves out, occupying the least desirable room in the shabbiest housing at the ass-end of campus. Turns out every such move requires a meeting with Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts), and it’s here that “Indignation” really makes its stand.
Schamus stages a 16-minute conversation that, for all the gentility of its language, is basically hand-to-hand combat.
The seemingly avuncular Caudwell praises Marcus (he says he’s sure to make a first-class lawyer) and then jabs him, bringing up his Jewishness and suggesting that the freshman’s inability to get along with his roommates may represent a serious character flaw.
Marcus complains about the chapel requirement, not because he’s Jewish but because he’s an atheist. He proclaims himself a disciple of philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Caldwell declares that Russell is little more than an intellectual degenerate.
This is wonderful, savage stuff as Marcus fights to make himself heard against this paragon of white-bread gentility and cultural superiority. When was the last time a movie allowed two characters to talk uninterrupted?
When Marcus finds himself in the hospital after an appendectomy, he is visited by Olivia, who brings his books and assignments and delivers a hand job under the bedsheets. (A most Roth-ian moment!)
He’s also visited by his concerned mother (Linda Emond, one of those faces every moviegoer and TV watcher recognizes, even though the name is unfamiliar), who is seasoned enough to realized that beneath her worldly pose Olivia is a suicidal wreck. In the film’s second great conversation, she convinces/shames her son into abandoning this young woman lest she bring him down.
Roth’s novel opens and closes with segments narrated by Marcus from a Korean battlefield, and Schamus dutifully duplicates these passages. Yet they don’t work. They’re essential to the yarn’s ultimate outcome, but they somehow feel phony and forced. Not to mention depressing.
Still, as directing debuts go, Schamus’ is more than solid, with moments of sufficient intellectual power to remind us how vacuous most of today’s movies really are.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
A “B” is far too kind.
Though perhaps we give the film extra points for actually trying, even if the attempt falls sadly & significantly short of achieving anything of value.
And perhaps the problem here is Roth? Or maybe Schamus’s Rothian screenplay?
But this is not a real story….there are not real characters who possess real feelings living any kind of a real life. There are only cutouts, silhouettes of might-have-been characters who stand as mouthpiece for the debates Roth chooses to enact. That being said, yes, the debates themselves (as noted above) are fascinating set-pieces. When Marcus wrestles God, the Dean (distinctly not “sir”) the back and forth crackles.
It does not, however, crackle with the kind of edge we find in real-life conversations (especially heated ones), rather it radiates the kind of designed intensity we encounter only on the stage itself (which, of course is exactly what this feels like). The 16 minute debate is the centerpiece of the film — and extraordinarily entertaining — but, in the end, it amounts to nothing. It only illustrates the irresistible force and immovable object…the sound & the fury. We learn nothing we didn’t already know.
So too with the Mother’s soliloquy, though in many ways it is more central to the issues at hand than the peripheral tempest there in the Dean’s office. Her voice, though, is more the voice not of Mother but of Narrator — telling Marcus AND the audience: this is where we’re going and why.
And so we go there…back to where we began… having spent our 2 hrs. on this bus (moderately entertained by the passing landscape) only to arrive at the point of departure, having gone, pleasantly, exactly nowhere.