Indignation spurs little upset

By Katherine Monk

There’s Vertigo. There’s Happiness. But when you’re talking movie titles based on feelings, it’s hard to top Le mépris, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 contemplation of Contempt, a movie that stewed in the titular emotion so long, it rendered even Brigitte Bardot’s beloved curves into a pruny profile of betrayal.

Indignation is a great title and, according to many critics, made for a great read from author Philip Roth. The Pulitzer winner’s 2008 novel about a Jewish kid coming of age in 1951 focuses on a new brand of tension between generations – where a new awareness of personal responsibility begins to eclipse ideas of duty and patriotism.

For young Marcus (Logan Lerman), the bright son of a working-class butcher, this emerging conflict becomes increasingly urgent as the Korean War starts plucking boys of his generation into a war zone.

Marcus doesn’t have any real urge to become a soldier. He would rather attend college, and with his good grades and studious demeanor, he ends up at a small university in the Midwest where he’s thrown into a residence with two other Jewish boys who immediately resent his presence.

Part of the problem is Marcus’s natural charisma. People like him. Even the popular boys and pretty girls think he’s got something unique. Credit leading man Lerman for embodying that weird blend of awkward carnal energy and intellectual self-possession that defines the 20-something male, but it’s really Sarah Gadon’s performance that makes the whole drama click because Marcus is relatively passive.

Forever the observer to his environment, Marcus is dragged into the active present when he’s approached by the school siren, Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon). Suggesting a hint of Grace Kelly with a shriek of Alice falling through the looking glass, Gadon captures the ethereal sexual energy of the female circa 1950, and then she cranks it one notch higher.

For Marcus, the target of Olivia’s desire, the result is a dizzying spiral of sexual satisfaction and lingering guilt. After all, this is still a world where girls aren’t supposed to have urges of their own.

With all that soft flesh prickling with foreign empowerment, Olivia violates the unspoken moral code. And she’s judged for it, which makes Marcus feel indignant.

Slight by slight, judgment by judgment, Marcus begins to see the adult world as hypocritical and cruel.

Director James Schamus brings the swirling discontentment to a head during a ten-minute scene in the dean’s office, where Marcus and Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts) engage in a verbal smackdown that articulates every message in the film, from society’s unfair assignment of personal value based on gender and religion to the unfair assertion of authority.

Lerman and Letts create a dramatic dance full of theatrical flourishes and comic beats, igniting the fireworks for a grand finale. But for all the sweaty moments and resentful glares, Schamus never cooks up a crockpot of stewing outrage.

Indignation needed a touch more of its titular ingredient to really register as anything more than an earnest period film tracing a familiar coming-of-age arc.

Director James Schamus, who comes to the director’s chair after a long run producing the work of Ang Lee and other Oscar-nominated work under the Focus Features banner, clearly learned a lot about production design and mood at the elbow of his collaborators.

You get the feeling he studied The Ice Storm’s structure and delivery of male emotion. At times, Lerman’s pale blue eyes have the same desperate look as Tobey Maguire’s angst-filled gaze – a stunned acknowledgement of universal unfairness lurking behind the American Dream.

It’s why Indignation works as a larger piece. The film hits the right notes and it has the right palette, the right look, to conjure a sense of history. It’s the emotional side of the story that feels a little limp and sometimes just flat out silly. Schamus picks a few strange frames that land like a pie in the viewer’s face, keeping us at arm’s length when we need to be intimate, but they aren’t enough to alienate us altogether.

The movie has a soft edge, a gentle Schamus style that makes it impossible to hate – and that’s not a bad thing. But if you’re going for Indignation with a capital ‘I,’ you need to spike the punch with a little piss and vinegar.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, August 8, 2016

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