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.
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