And I learned quite a lot when I was young.
- "When I Was Young," Eric Burdon & The Animals (1967)
"Indignation": B-. The latest Philip Roth novel to be brought to the screen is Indignation, the story of a smart but inexperienced Jewish boy from New Jersey who enrolls in Winesburg, a small Ohio college where he meets a complex beauty. What follows is usually the unexpected. For a serious, almost humorless, young man like Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), the only child of a Newark butcher and his wife, a well-planned college career becomes vulnerable to derailment.
That possibility is not to be taken lightly. The time is 1951 and deferments from the military draft are made available to college students. Those not fortunate enough to continue their education beyond high school are likely to end up on the front lines of the Korean War, a sad reality brought home to roost in the opening scenes. Marcus and his high school buddies knew the young man killed in action overseas whose funeral they are attending.
Substitute the word "blonde" for "brown" in the above-cited Animals song, and you have the theme of this film. The blonde is Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon) who, by draping her bare leg over the arm of a chair, wrecks Marcus' concentration while he's attempting to study in the library. The cultured daughter of a Cleveland physician, she is amused by his awkwardness and naivete on their first date when he takes her to a fancy restaurant called L' Escargot without actually knowing what escargot is. Sensing his nervousness at the table, she tells him to relax. He responds, "Believe me, I'm trying." Later the quietly assertive Olivia directs Marcus to pull into a dark cemetery where she proceeds to perform a bold move in the front seat of the parked car. Clearly she has been down a path where Marcus has never gone.
At first blush Marcus has everything going for him. He is a straight A student, and his high school resume includes varsity baseball and being captain of the debate team. Yet he is a misfit in many ways: his well-meaning but overbearing family; his choice of college, which requires each student to attend ten chapel services a year, regardless of the student's religious preference (which for atheist Marcus is none); his dormitory roommates, at least one of whom is freakishly odd, maybe even certifiably disturbed; and now his love interest. Not a typical freshman, Olivia is a transfer student from Mount Holyoke with a troubled past -- evidenced by a healing scar on her wrist she does not bother covering -- which is revealed a layer at a time.
The storytelling here is hit and miss. My main objection is that I simply did not find the main characters interesting. The best thing going for Gadon is her almost platinum blonde hair. For a movie romance, she does not appear on the screen nearly as much as her male counterpart. Most of what we learn about her character, Olivia, happened in the past, and there is a key conversation which she has with another character (not Marcus) which is not shown.
Lerman, who strongly resembles comedy actor Paul Rudd, only younger, ironically plays Marcus as phlegmatic. While the character is serious and introspective, traits more easily fleshed out in a novel than a movie, neither Lerman nor director James Schamus succeed in developing Marcus beyond a typical college freshman. This is Schamus' first shot at directing after years of producing and writing. I will be curious to see if he pursues his new line of work going forward.
It is too bad there could not have been more scenes like the interrogation through which Marcus suffers when he's called on the carpet by Dean H.D. Caudwell (Tracy Letts) to explain why he requested a room transfer. In all fairness to Schamus, who wrote the screenplay, the dialogue between the student and the dean is perfect, evolving from a "make yourself comfortable" opening to an all-out debate several minutes later.
The film starts and ends with the observation that sometimes one encounters a series of seemingly random minor events which brings that person to a turning point in his life. There is a clever tie-in between the movie's opening shots and the fade-out. It's those pesky intervening random minor events which could have used an infusion of energy.
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