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Movie Review: 'Indignation'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's rare in the modern movie marketplace for the author of the book from a which a film emerges to be the most familiar name connected with the project.

But that's the case with Indignation, a period drama adapted from the 2008 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Philip Roth, the author of nearly 30 novels, a number of which have been turned into such movies as Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye Columbus, and The Human Stain.

Inspired by Roth's college years, Indignation – a lesser-known Roth work but a best-seller nonetheless -- is a coming-of-age period piece about an introverted, working-class Jewish kid from Newark, New Jersey, named Marcus Messner, played by Logan Lerman, whose father is a kosher butcher.

As an only child and the first family in his extended family to go to college, he enrolls in a small liberal arts college in Ohio in 1951.

This is during the Korean War, but Marcus has a deferment.

 

2½
(2½ stars out of 4)

 

A bit of a rebel and feeling very much like a Jew on a Christian campus, the anything-but-worldly Marcus becomes infatuated with Olivia Hutton, played by Sarah Gadon, a young woman – yes, a shiksa goddess of sorts – whom he notices in the library and manages to approach.

She is, it turns out, a lot more worldly and experienced than he, and on their first date, something unexpected happens – something that won't be revealed here, except by way of reminding that this is indeed a Philip Roth narrative.

Later, as Marcus learns more about Olivia and their relationship blossoms, some of Marcus's overprotective parents' (Linda Emond, Danny Burstein) worst fears begin to surface.

James Schamus, a writer and producer on several Ang Lee projects, here makes his writing/directing debut and captures fifties academia with an unerring eye.

In Lerman, who's been acting since he was eight years old and who also served as an executive producer, Schamus has a natural and well-cast leading man who's in virtually every scene.

Lerman's performance is fine, although the character's awkwardness and passivity probably keeps us a little more emotionally detached than we wish to be.

The dramatic highlight of the film is an unusually long but riveting encounter between Marcus and the school's disapproving and accusatory dean, played smartly by Tracy Letts, during which Marcus holds his own against a crafty, authoritarian mind and voice and several of the film's themes, such as stifling conformity and sexual repression, emerge and suddenly gain a modern resonance.

Character remains more crucial than plot in what is not a triumphant, but certainly an absorbing, translation from page to screen.

So we'll enroll in 2-1/2 stars out of 4. Respectable but not quite delectable, the melancholy drama is a quiet, well-crafted look back in time that manages to tenderly express Philip Roth's Indignation.

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