Indignation – movie review

In 2008, Philip Roth published his 29th novel, Indignation, a story that returned him to his own youth, growing up in Newark, New Jersey before attending a small liberal arts college. One of America’s most honored and accomplished writers – having received a Pulitzer Prize – Roth was 75 years old when he turned back the clock. While details of the story roughly mirror Roth’s life, with Winesburg College serving as a stand in for Pennsylvania’s Bucknell University – Roth’s alma mater – the yarn isn’t exactly autobiographical.

But the world of ideas that Roth wove together to create Indignation nevertheless felt very personal and profound to the film’s writer and director James Schamus, who connected to the novel’s reservoir of “empathy and elegy”. In adapting the book for the screen, Schamus turned to two other literary figures of the late 20th century, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, for inspiration. While both were contemporaries of Roth, neither one was directly connected to his intellectual circle.

Indignation takes place in 1951, as Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), a brilliant working class Jewish boy from Newark travels on scholarship to a small, conservative college in Ohio. By doing so he becomes exempt from being drafted into the Korean War, now in its second year … a war that hangs heavily over Newark. Before leaving to further his studies, Messner works for his father, a kosher butcher. While he is loath to admit it, Messner also looks forward to escaping his dad’s nearly obsessive concerns over his safety and fate.

Among the manicured lawns and leafy paths of Winesburg College, Messner takes his role as student quite seriously. With his academic pursuits and his part-time job in the college library filling his days, he has time for little else, especially such obligations as the college’s mandatory weekly Wednesday chapel. All that changes though when he meets and goes on a date with a forward classmate in Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon). You wouldn’t be wrong in saying that Hutton turns his head, but her history is a checkered one and his natural conservatism holds him back. Theirs is bound to be a relationship that is far from easy. Add to that the fact that Messner has attracted the wrong kind of attention from the college’s imposing Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts), with whom he clashes and then you come to realise that Messner’s bright future is far from assured.

Indignation is a dramatic coming of age story that doesn’t follow a conventional path. It is not a happily ever after tale, but a journey of substance and pathos, one in which a free and forward thinking young man’s aspirations are derailed due to circumstances that appear to conspire against him.

Logan Lerman is ever so compelling as the respectful but determined centerpiece, tripped up by fate and feminine wiles. Hutton’s forthright charm and sex appeal inevitably have Messner returning for more, and Sarah Gadon’s insights into her character’s strengths and vulnerabilities make her a force to be reckoned with.

The first confrontation between the dean and Messner in the former’s office is excruciatingly drawn out, but then that sense of an ordeal was arguably the director’s way of us feeling a little of how the character does – deeply frustrated.

The filmmakers have done an excellent job recreating the look and feel of the early ‘50s and the social mores that were pervasive at that time. Indignation makes for intelligent, thought-provoking cinema and scores a 7½ to 8 out of 10.

Director: James Schamus
Cast: Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts
Release Date: 18 August 2016
Rating: M

Alex First