Review: Indignation

Though this is his directorial debut, Indignation bears the hallmarks that have defined James Schamus as both Ang Lee's go-to screenwriter and co-founder and former CEO of Focus Features. This adaptation of Philip Roth's extremely personal 29th novel brims with taste, style and intelligence and is immaculate in execution.

Based on Roth's own early-50's college experience, Indignation follows Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), the Newark-born only son of a kosher butcher (Danny Burstein) and his overprotective wife (Linda Emond). Marcus is a nice Jewish boy, polite and dutiful, but also ready to escape the controlling clutches of his parents who have become even more suffocating after his classmates begin coming home in coffins as a result of being enlisted in the Korean War. He believes that enrolling in an Ohio university will allow him some form of freedom, but he trades one restriction for another and makes decisions that lead to tragic consequences.

Thematically, Indignation centers on the inescapable interplay between fate and choice, sex and mortality, and upbringing and individualism. All these are embodied in Marcus' infatuation with the pristinely blonde Olivia Hatton (Sarah Gadon), who scrambles his stability with her sexual forwardness. He's aroused, ashamed and awash with confusion after she gives him a blowjob on their first date. Did she do that because her parents are divorced? he wonders. Girls in Newark wouldn't do such a thing but then again, he realises, there aren't any girls like WASP princess Olivia Hatton in Newark. For all his protestations against his parents' limited worldview, Marcus proves himself trapped and shaped by those very limits. "I wonder how my own sorry efforts to overcome those morals may have fostered so much misunderstanding, even grief," he later ponders.

His continued relationship with Olivia, who confides that she once tried to commit suicide, becomes one of the salvos deployed by Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts) during the breathtaking 15-minute one-on-one encounter that is the film's centerpiece. Caudwell needles the young man about everything from his decision to move dorm rooms even though the college ensured he was with other boys of his kind; Marcus counters he didn't want his roommates' record-playing to distract him from his studies. What about not attending chapel? the Dean probes. And on it continues - the exchange is a chilling, thrilling and comic verbal duel with both participants strongly standing their grounds. In fact, this tete-a-tete is so brilliant that everything that came before and all that follows it pale in comparison.

There are times when the film is too stately and precise for its own good; Indignation could have used more of the controlled abandon that made Marcus' showdown with Caudwell soar. Yet one can't really fault any part of the film. The performances are on point, the recreation and detailing of the period is impeccable, the craftsmanship unimpeachable, and the transformation of Roth's literary work into a cinematic one is impressive.

Indignation

Directed by: James Schamus

Written by: James Schamus

Starring: Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Danny Burstein, Linda Emond, Pico Alexander, Ben Rosenfield