Several critics are proclaiming Indignation the best adaptation of a Philip Roth novel yet and I don’t necessarily disagree. The film is sensitively acted, with meticulous period detail, and a kind of lively intellectualism not often seen in contemporary American films. I admired it quite a bit, but would’ve liked it more if it had done a better job of engaging my emotions. As it is, many of its characters remained fascinating enigmas. (Full disclosure: I’ve read my fair share of Roth, but I haven’t read the 2008 novel on which the film is based.)
At first glance, our narrator and hero Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman) is the prototypical “nice Jewish boy,” who works diligently at his father’s butcher shop in Newark, NJ and is a straight-A student. It’s 1951, and Marcus has had his draft deferred to the Korean War because he’s attending the (made-up) Winesburg College in Ohio. His father has recently become beset by anxieties, especially about his only son, partly because some of Marcus’ friends have gone to war and not come back, and partly because of some unspecified dread (he’s one of the film’s many enigmas). Still, somehow he manages to let Marcus leave the nest and go to college.
Once Marcus arrives at Winesburg, we discover that he is an uncommonly serious student, with no interest in establishing a social life. He mostly ignores his two roommates and rejects overtures from the school’s only Jewish fraternity. He is irritated by the fact that the school requires he attend a weekly church service, not just because he is Jewish, but because he is an avowed atheist, who reads Bertrand Russell in his spare time.
Then one day, as often happens in Roth novels, Marcus sees a beautiful blonde girl (Sarah Gadon) at the library and becomes instantly besotted. Her name is Olivia and she comes from money—private schools, country clubs, all things exotic to Marcus. He borrows his roommate’s car and takes her out and then is freaked out when she proves to be more sexually frank than he is. His arousal turns to (mostly self) disgust, which turns to a kind of protectiveness when he discovers that Olivia once tried to kill herself. (This is problematic in a very specific Rothian way: Is Olivia sexually uninhibited because she’s mentally ill? Mentally ill because she’s sexually uninhibited? Or does one have nothing to do with the other?)
Marcus’ relationship with Olivia is one of the film’s two most pivotal. The other is his relationship with the school’s dean of studies, Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts), who summons Marcus to his office after the young man scuffles with his roommates and asks to be transferred to a single room. It’s clear almost right away that the dean has some contempt for Marcus and wants to break him of his intellectual certainty and stubbornness. But why the antipathy? Is it simply because Marcus is Jewish? (The dean chides Marcus for not referring to his father’s butcher shop as a “kosher butcher.”) Or is there something more? Marcus, for his part, proves not to be the dutiful Jewish boy we thought, but a fiercely proud and self-righteous young man, who works through his fear to give as good as he gets. Both actors are brilliant in this face-off. Letts plays the whole scene with an annoying, somewhat smug smile on his face; Lerman shows how a squirming, sweating, boiling-with-rage Marcus actually allows the confrontation to make him physically ill.
Indignation, which is directed with confidence by former studio head James Schamus, is an exploration of 20th-century Jewish-American identity. We have the brilliant, but defiant student who loses his way when he falls for the unstable girl. We have the Jewish father gone nearly mad with his fear of the unknown. And we have Marcus’ mother (a great Linda Emond), a strong woman who makes her own deal with the devil in the name of protecting her son. If the film had managed to make them more fully fleshed out characters rather than mere archetypes, it could’ve been a masterpiece. As it is, Indignation may indeed be the best of the Roth adaptations, but it also illustrates just how difficult adapting Roth can be.