Right after American Pastoral last week, here is another strangely uninvolving, enigmatically moderate Philip Roth adaptation from a first-time feature director. This time, it’s screenwriter James Schamus, famed for his collaborations with Ang Lee.
Hollywood loves to turn out middling Roth movies, while leaving Bellow and Updike pretty much alone, attracted by Roth’s apparent potential for sex, angst and a period setting. Someone even now is surely developing Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, a dystopia about fascist US rule that has a fair claim to be the most relevant artwork currently in existence. Yet without Roth’s mediating prose, the action can so easily become a kind of nostalgist peevishness.
Indignation is a novel from the Bill Clinton 90s, and it even turns on the male lead declaring, “I did not have sexual intercourse …” (ie, of the sort that causes pregnancy) with a certain woman, as Bill once said about Monica. Logan Lerman plays Marcus, an intense young Jewish guy at a repressive 1950s college where antisemitism is embedded in its tightly buttoned establishment, epitomised by the pompous dean, played by Tracy Letts.
Marcus begins an intense relationship with a fascinatingly damaged yet preternaturally confident and beautiful non-Jewish fellow student, with the outrageously Wasp name of Olivia Hutton. She is played a touch generically by Sarah Gadon. The relationship brings him into conflict with the college and his troubled parents.
It’s handled confidently enough and the agonisingly drawn out confrontational conversation with the dean, which ends with Marcus fainting, is a success. Yet the pace plods, and this heavily furnished, inadequately ventilated movie never entirely comes to life.
