In his first feature film as writer-director, James Schamus does something elusive and perhaps difficult even to describe.
Based on the novel of the same name by Philip Roth, “Indignation” takes place mostly in 1951 and tells the story of a Jewish kid from Newark, N.J., who goes away to school at a small, traditional college in Ohio.
[...] as the film opens, one of the young man’s friends is dead because he didn’t go to college and therefore didn’t get to defer his military service in Korea.
A sense pervades, not of a hostile world, but of a careless one, in which fatal things can happen randomly or stupidly or for causes that don’t become obvious until they’re inescapable.
In mid-life, he has suddenly become neurotic with anxiety and dread, either because he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or because he has developed a sixth sense about the true nature of things.
When Marcus escapes Newark and goes to college, the screen is filled with sunshine and the atmosphere seems to lift, but not completely.
There are other Jews at the college, but they travel in defined circles — there’s a Jewish fraternity, for example — and everyone, regardless of religion, is expected to attend Christian church services, at least 10 times each year.
Gadon is really rather wonderful in this film, plaintive and haunting, with all her nerve endings raw.
[...] the story and treatment keep inviting us to circle back to it and wonder what the characters might have done here or should have done there.
