Philip Roth kicked off his literary career with 1959’s Goodbye Columbus, a typical first effort in many respects, concerned with the lessons learned by one Neil Klugman as he butts up against intra-Semitic class restrictions in mid-century Newark. Fifty years later, the author released Indignation another ostensible bildungsroman set amid the same general time period, with the added wrinkle that its intense, idealistic Jewish protagonist, after attempting assimilation at a stuffy Midwestern university, ends up dying in Korea, his spectral narrator telling the tale from beyond the grave. Directing his first feature after years as a writer, producer and studio executive, James Schamus’ choice of this late novel as an entry point into filmmaking makes sense: a story of new beginnings told from a place of judicious experience. Directing for the first time at the age of 56, the former head of Focus Features serves the source material well, exhibiting a careful sense of classicism that deftly suits the subject and setting.
As a whole, Roth’s work hasn’t done well on the big screen, in large part because his novels are so relentlessly internal, hinging on minute emotional revelations that don’t necessarily translate into snappy plot devices. They often seize upon a single discrete instance, charting that moment’s influence in shaping the outcome of the rest of the narrative, a single, seemingly unimportant occurrence rippling outward. Telling the story of young Marcus Messer (Logan Lerman), Indignation finds that essential detail in the bobbling foot of Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon), whom Marcus spots studying in the library during his first semester at Ohio’s Winesburg College. Intent on leaving his Jewish upbringing far behind, pursuing a new life as a scholar and secular humanist, Marcus is instantly enraptured with the shiksa goddess, who seems to represent the entire new world of possibility that’s opened up to him.
The product of a sheltered home and a close-knit religious community, Marcus isn’t as worldly as he thinks, however, and this courtship is complicated by another simple gesture after Olivia unceremoniously performs oral sex on him after an otherwise routine first date. Setting this episode at the center of an unspooling network of small incidents and events, Schamus proceeds to adapt Roth’s slim tome with an assured sense of pacing and an eccentric conversation-centered structure. In this sense, the film sidesteps a common problem of adaptation, avoiding a drab rehashing of escalating events in favor of a composite approach, concerned with the texture and import of individual moments, which build toward a definitive but gently-handled climax.
Messer, a sports and academic star from Roth’s usual home setting of Newark, spends much of the film laboring under the illusion of college as a place for new beginnings and philosophical awakenings, where he can shake off any hint of ethnicity and define himself as an exclusively American academic. Instead, he finds a new world of divisions and classifications, hounded by Jewish fraternity members and menaced by his irritating outcast roommates. An adversary is provided in the figure of Dean of Students Hawes Caudwell (Tracy Letts) a sly authoritarian who disguises his disgust for Marcus’ free-thinking aspirations beneath ribbons of slick rhetoric. The two square off in a pair of lengthy conversations, which mix courtroom interrogatory with moral reckoning, circling vertiginously around questions of religion, rebellion and conformity.
Shot in a steady shot/reverse shot that recalls a spirited game of ping-pong, these two discussions are dramatic highlights and also central structural pinions, establishing Caudwell as the story’s ultimate gatekeeper and the film’s essential rigid quality. The soft is represented by Olivia, who Schamus routinely bathes in heavenly light, accentuating her virginal qualities, while also acknowledging her complicated history of sexual experience and mental illness. Just as Caudwell represents the doors closed by societal repression, Olivia stands in for possibilities dashed by personal limitations, as Marcus is both drawn to and repelled by her strong-willed, complicated mixture of perfection and deficiency. It’s through these elusive qualities that the movie confirms its worldview and solidifies its essential eccentricity, using the sheen of prestige familiarity to instead achieve the far more delicate and mysterious. The result is a talky, texturally sumptuous film that manages to balance substance with an insistent light touch, spinning out its source story in rich and surprising form.
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