James Shamas' adaption of Philip Roth's 'Indignation' is a disappointment. It is a sentimental treatment of Roth's novel, which isn't sentimental.
'Indignation' opens with a father's recitation of 'kadish', a prayer for the dead and it ends with another one. The voice over is unchanging in tone; it is a voice that comes from beyond the grave. Hollywood has found a lode of good fortune in returning to the early days of post-war America. In such films say as 'Trumbo' and 'Bridge of Spies', it has torn off the skin of race nationality confusion of what it to be an American. 'Indignation' falls square in that time, in the early years of the Korea War, and the basso continuo of what became the McCarthy era. We are in Newark, New Jersey at half-century in 20 century America. Newark is a Jewish enclave of hard working people, loyal Americans, but live in a self-contained ghetto of sorts, sheltered as it is from the American mainstream. We are far from the melting pot; the Jews like other ethnics live separately but add variety to life in America. Newark sends its sons to fight in Europe or the Pacific, and at the time of film to the 'forgotten war' in Korea.
An excellent student Markie is going to college, and as such, he is exempt from the draft and almost certain death in faraway Korea.
Newark may be the center of Markie's world, but in tone and in accept and in customs, they are far from the world of the native colonial stock of English whose manners and ways and power and religion that formed the United States.
Newark is wrapped in a blanket of its weaving. And Markie is no more wiser to broader life because of that.
He goes to Winesberg College that, too, embodies small town America, but with a difference. As an institution, it may be as provincial and small-minded as Newark, but it represents the Anglo-Saxon attitudes that set the narrow boundaries of what is permissible and what is not in religion, in thought, stifling any personal life of the mind or thought beyond the mores of the day.
Markie is an innocent, and in his naivety is his downfall. The dean confronts him for his inability to embrace college life to the fullest. Massner is an atheist who chaffs at attending obligatory weekly chapel with its emphasis on strong, muscular Protestant values; these values are an inversion of his Jewish environment; they affront his staunch rationalism.
He defends his value before the dean to whom he refers insistently as 'Sir', not 'Dean', which to this symbol of authority is an affront and an act of will that challenges 'society' as Winesberg defines it.
In spirit, it mirrors the witch hunt of the times, on which Lillian Hellman pinned the tag of 'scoundrel', if not scurrilous.
Markie is a young man of feelings. He is a virgin and falls for a young woman, unloved by her family and is emotionally and mentally unstable.
And his very own inexperience and his own idealism lead to his expulsion from college and ultimately to his death in Korea.
'Indignation' is a dirge. It evokes an America that strangely reflects the passions and solipsism of today.
There is little to fault from cinematic values. And yet, the not unsubtle tone of anti-Semitism is never far from the surface. It is the age of the Rosenbergs and what that means. It is an age of purifying the American mind of liberal thought and open mindedness in a Manichean world of them and us, of the Commies and we the Freedom loving people.
It is no accident that the Korean War plays in the background. It is a war that the US didn't win, and has forgotten, even though it thought of itself as the arsenal of democracy of defenders of the Free World.
Now in the 21century, 'Indignation' speaks to our condition of intolerance and muscular politics and war. It has cut its cloth to the same provincialism and anger and pride that has been hurt that Roth wrote about.
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