Deborah Ross

About a boy | 17 November 2016

This Philip Roth adaptation is tremendously well served by a terrific cast – but don’t ask me what it all adds up to

Indignation is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 novel and amazingly, for an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel — see the recent dog’s dinner that was American Pastoral, for example — it may even be worth two hours of your time. (Depending on what you would otherwise be doing with that time; I wouldn’t wish for you to cancel that hip operation or similar.)

It stars Logan Lerman as Marcus Messner, a 19-year-old Jewish boy from Newark who, in 1951, escapes the Korean war and the over-anxious clutches of his parents by winning a scholarship to a college in Ohio. Marcus, at the outset, is a good Jewish boy — an exemplary Jewish boy. Marcus is the Jewish boy you would want if you happened to be in the market for a Jewish boy. He is super-bright, serious, a straight-A student. Marcus and his parents (his father is a butcher) are determined he will make it to law school, and there is no reason to imagine he won’t. But Ohio is an unknown quantity — ‘How will you keep kosher?’ asks his mother’s friend, worriedly. And it’s in Ohio that his life does, indeed, go awry, as the college’s conservative Christian values close in on him and he’s forced to feel the emotion for which the film’s title is absolutely the mot juste.

This is the directorial debut of James Schamus, who also penned the screenplay, and is otherwise a producer (Suffragette, Happiness, Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility) and writer (The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Eat Drink Man Woman) and if he doesn’t take out the rubbish or unstack the dishwasher, I put it to you: where would he find the time? Schamus conjures a compelling sense of dread — it feels ominous from the opening frame — and also captures the stifling, suffocating nature of a 1950s campus where girls are constrained by curfews, boys are strangled by buttoned-up shirts worn with ties, and regular chapel-going is mandatory for all, regardless.

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