‘Indignation’ gets Roth’s novel right
By Kenneth Turan
“Indignation” tells a story that’s bittersweet, heartbreaking and bleakly comic all at once, and it gets it right.
The film marks an impressive directing debut for James Schamus and a glowing showcase for costars Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon. Its inspiration is the 1950s novelistic world of Philip Roth. Adapted by Schamus from Roth’s 2008 novel, “Indignation” is essentially a melancholy, star-crossed romance.
Though he never had directed before, Schamus has done almost everything else, from producing and screenwriting (he was Oscar-nominated for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon“) to being CEO of Focus Features for many years.
“Indignation” is set in 1951, first in the insular Jewish community of Newark, New Jersey, then in the WASP environs of Ohio’s Winesburg College, where protagonist Marcus Messner is an incoming freshman.
Convincingly played by Lerman and known as Marky to his parents, Messner is a smart, serious young man and “the nicest boy in the world,” according to his mother. But he finds the world outside of Newark a difficult place to negotiate in the middle of the Korean War. “Indignation,” in fact, opens with the funeral of one of his high school classmates.
Linda Emond plays Marcus’ mother, and Danny Burstein (currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof”) his father, the butcher at Messner’s Meat & Poultry. As his son prepares to leave for college, his father begins to obsessively worry about Marky’s fate in the wider world.
Winesburg College is a place where men wear white bucks, women have curfews, and everyone is expected to attend chapel. Rooming in a triple with the only two Jews who don’t live in the Jewish fraternity house, Marcus would love to concentrate on his studies, but then he sees Olivia Hutton.
As impeccably played by Gadon, Olivia is the ultimate Gentile goddess, a poised and luminous blond and a transfer student from Mount Holyoke. And she is as intrigued by Marcus as he is by her. But she turns out to be a fragile individual with her own problems. The two go out on a proper date, and its aftereffects leave Marcus completely unnerved.
Great torrents of words pour from this film’s characters, and never more so than in Marcus’ faceoff against the college’s meddlesome dean of men (Tracy Letts).
Very character-driven, “Indignation” focuses on its young protagonists as they movingly attempt to discover who they are as individuals and as a possible couple.
They also must finally confront the reality of, as Roth writes in the novel’s conclusion, “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”
Life, so it turns out, has a tendency to demand a price from us we are unprepared to pay.