STRICTLY COMPELLING
INDIGNATION
THE searing drama “Indignation” revisits a time and place that operated under such a strict moral code that today it is utterly alien, although it was merely the United States in the early ’50s.
Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, the bloody consequences of which are depicted at the outset, James Schamus’ film of Philip Roth’s novel features a superb, textured performance by Logan Lerman as Marcus, a high-achieving Jewish boy from Newark, NJ. He goes off to college in Ohio, where he has a spat with his roommates while striking up a complicated romance with a blond gentile (Sarah Gadon).
In a dazzling, prosecutorial central scene, the dean (Tracy Letts) inexplicably presses Marcus on the importance of fitting in at the school, and Marcus replies hotly that he has done nothing wrong — though he doesn’t see why, as an atheist, he should be forced to attend chapel. Soon a social problem starts to seem like moral sloppiness, at least to the dean.
It’s a stretch to portray 1951 as harshly puritanical, and to its discredit the book and the film don’t touch upon a follow-up question: What happens when everything is permitted? Nevertheless, in its portrait of American youth as a high-stakes affair instead of the extended play-date it is today, “Indignation” is devastating, haunting and important. Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sexuality). Now playing.