TOP MARKS FOR COLLEGE KIDS
This coming-of-age drama about young love on a university campus is as beautiful as it is smart
You wait ages for an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel and then two come along at once. Actually, that’s only half-true. Two have certainly arrived in our cinemas in quick succession, in the form of Ewan McGregor’s stolid, badly miscast American Pastoral, and now Indignation, written and directed by James Schamus.
But nobody was waiting for them, most probably not even, or quite possibly least of all, 83-year-old Roth himself.
The man widely regarded as America’s greatest living novelist has seen plenty of his books adapted for the big screen, but hardly any have properly captured their spirit, complexity, sadness and wit.
Indignation, I’m pleased to report, pretty much nails it on all counts. And unlike American Pastoral, in which McGregor was winceinducingly wrong in the lead role, it is meticulously well cast.
Above all, Logan Lerman is marvellous as the story’s engaging if introspective hero. This is Marcus Messner, who leaves his close-knit neighbourhood in Newark, New Jersey, where his father is a kosher butcher, to attend a small college in ohio, where of the 1,400 students on campus, ‘less than 80 are Jewish’.
It is 1951 and the Korean War is raging. The film is bookended by the same scene of soldiers in conflict, but Marcus, with his scholarship to Winesburg College, is insulated from all that. The closest he seems likely to get to the battlefield is the funeral back home in Newark of a school friend killed in Korea. Nonetheless, his parents and, in particular, his father Max (Danny Burstein), are no less anxious about his imminent departure than if he really were going off to war.
It is a huge relief to Marcus to escape his father’s stultifying neuroticism, and soon there is a very different kind of relief, when the intoxicatingly lovely, incontestably gentile olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon) does him the kind of sexual favour that he has only ever read about.
But Marcus is torn. What kind of girl would do that on a first date? It must be because her parents are divorced, he decides. There is ‘no other explanation for a mystery so profound’.
Meanwhile, Marcus has been assigned a room with two other Jewish students, but finds them no more congenial to live with than his parents. He also rejects the advances of the college’s only Jewish fraternity, citing his atheism and lack of clubbability.
But when he asks for new accommodation, he is summoned to the office of the Dean (Tracy Letts) to explain himself. The intense, wordy encounter between the ferociously bright, atheist freshman, and the conservative, God-fearing dean, is one of this film’s enveloping pleasures.
LETTS is not only a fine actor, he is also an accomplished playwright, so maybe that is why he so relishes the theatricality of a scene that is exquisitely, almost painfully prolonged. Indeed, it is more theatrical than cinematic, but then that is true of quite a lot of this film. Maybe that is the answer to the conundrum of adapting Roth for the screen; make it more like a play.
Whatever, Schamus has done a terrific job, helped immeasurably by his actors. Gadon is beautifully cast as the seemingly serene, but emotionally troubled, olivia, with whom Marcus becomes besotted.
And all the smaller parts are filled perfectly, such as that of Marcus’s mother, Esther (Linda Emond). She heads for ohio when Marcus is recuperating from appendicitis and, after meeting olivia, forces him into an impossible promise, conclusively showing that his past and his future, like his intellect and his emotions, not to mention his conscience and his libido, are irreconcilably at odds.
It is such an intelligent, thoughtprovoking film, as all Roth adaptations should be and so few are.
THAT very Jewish brand of angst, which Woody Allen turns into comedy and Philip Roth into tragedy, also flavours The New Man, a film by Josh Appignanesi, which at first looks like an improvised drama but is best characterised as a fly-onhis-own-wall documentary.
It begins with his wedding to academic Devorah Baum, but the focus is on her pregnancy, which follows three years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive. Josh is thrilled but also full of trepidation. Soon there will be a creature who needs mothering even more than he does. In fact, there will be two of them; Devorah is expecting twins.
Poignantly, and often very
amusingly, the film charts both sets of anxieties, hers and his, as the birth draws closer.
She worries about having to befriend other new parents, he agonises about the example of his own father, who left the family home when Josh was just five. Then they learn that both twins are boys but that, tragically, one will not survive. There is a deeply affecting scene, following the birth, when Josh walks down a London street looking like he’s been dragged through a hedge both backwards and forwards, while congratulatory voicemail messages play. But among them is a message from the Jewish burial society, needing to discuss funeral arrangements.
In the end, though, this is an uplifting film about that unique yet universal, extraordinary yet everyday rite of passage in which non-parents become parents.
Its best line comes from Devorah, who looks at her infant son and sees ‘the answer to the riddle of existence’, while aware that everyone else looks at him and sees just a baby.
That neatly sums up the paradox of parenthood, and I have news for Devorah and Josh; it doesn’t end. the