Indignation review: Philip Roth adaptation is grim but poignant viewing

Indignation is a coming-of-age tale with a very elegiac feel, a film about youth made from the perspective of someone clearly very old. It’s the story of a young man in early 1950s America but its first, pre-credit scene is set in the present day, at a home where an elderly lady is being given her pills.

Disconcertingly, we’re plunged back in time to a night skirmish during the Korean War many years before in which an American soldier is shot and killed. We hear a mournful voiceover reflecting on the coincidences and accidents that lead to death. “It’s important to understand about dying that even though, in general, you don’t have a personal choice in the matter… there are reasons you die, there are causes.”

Director James Schamus, who adapted Indignation from Philip Roth’s 2008 novel, turns the usual conventions of the rites-of-passage movie on their head. Whether in American Graffiti or I Vitelloni or in Diner, such films will generally come steeped in nostalgia but will portray the youth of the protagonists in a riotously celebratory fashion. Their futures may be uncertain but the young bucks will be riding in cars, drinking and making out with girls. What’s different about Indignation is the fatalism that the hero feels right from the outset.

Marcus Messner (brilliantly played by Logan Lerman, hitherto best known for starring in the Percy Jackson movies) is a precociously intelligent Jewish kid from New Jersey. His father is a kosher butcher. The family are determined that he will go to college, not just so he can better himself but because that is a way of avoiding the draft for the Korean War. An old school friend, Jonah, has already been killed in action. Marcus has been accepted at university in Winesburg, Ohio. To his family, the Midwest seems as distant at Mars.

Outwardly, this seems the typical tale of a bright young student on the make. When Marcus arrives at college in Winesburg, he has the predictable experiences. In time-honoured fashion, he has a sexual encounter with a girl in a car. He’s also a rebel in his own intellectual way, alert to the many small but unmistakable signs of anti-semitism around him.

The Jewish students are all made to room together and are made aware that they are outsiders in the close-knit Midwestern college. They’re forced to attend chapel. There is also a virulent fear of communist influence within. Even listening to a Paul Robeson record is considered seditious behaviour.

Marcus isn’t slow to spot the inconsistencies and hypocrisy in the school’s codes. He continually challenges his teachers. In one exhilarating set-piece that lasts for 15 minutes, he’s shown in full, fiery debate mode with the university’s Dean (Tracy Letts), quoting Bertrand Russell at him to justify his own atheism. The Dean answers back in equally outspoken fashion.

Even so, the film maintains the strangely foreboding tone that Schamus establishes at the outset. Marcus’s father has premonitions that something awful might happen to his son. (“The tiniest mistakes have consequences,” he grimly warns Marcus on the eve of his departure.)

At college, Marcus encounters the beautiful Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon.) There’s a fetishistic scene in which he is shown gazing with longing at her across the university library as she crosses her legs. In most coming-of-age movies, first romance is portrayed in playful, tender fashion. Here, it is shown as dark and destructive. Olivia is glamorous, intelligent, and uninhibited. Her forwardness startles and troubles Marcus. Their relationship ultimately changes the entire course of his life.

Gadon brings poise, coquetry and vulnerability to her role as the siren causing Marcus to crash against the reefs. Olivia eats snails. She seems very worldly-wise and looks as if she is entirely in control of her life but, it soon becomes apparent, the opposite is the case. Marcus is both besotted and utterly baffled by her.

Roth wrote the novel Indignation when he was well into his 70s. It is a story that is steeped in longing and in guilt. There’s a morbidity to the film version that you won’t find in other movie adaptations of Roth’s earlier novels. For example, the film of Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1969) is also about a young Jewish man in love but deals with its subject matter in upbeat and comic fashion.

Here, by contrast, there’s a jarring sense from the very beginning that the fates are against the young lovers. The romantic scenes look at first as if they are generic enough – a guy and a girl in a car. Innocence, though, is quickly lost. A simple sexual act has unforeseen consequences.

“In Newark, it was inconceivable that girls like Olivia Hutton could do such a thing. Then again, there were no girls like Olivia Hutton in Newark,” Marcus reflects in his voice-over, which seems to come from out of time as if he is speaking to us like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard from beyond the grave.

One of the reasons Indignation works so much better than most other Roth adaptations is its tightness of focus. This is a small-scale film in which nothing momentous appears to happen. Marcus’ experiences aren’t any different from those of any other college student in early 1950s America. Even so, a number of small, seemingly throwaway incidents have a seismic knock-on effect.

As his father predicts, tiny mistakes can indeed have terrible consequences. Schamus shows just how easily a life can unravel. That’s what makes Indignation such grim but poignant viewing.