Picture me, young and wild, in the summer of 2016. I heard about this small film coming out and it promised to fill all of my desires for a film at the time.
First it had a mysterious and pretentious name, Indignation. Good, that means there is probably intellectual dialogue at least. It promised to be a serious drama. And it had one of my top three favorite young actors at the helm.
I needed to see this film! But alas, didn’t get to the theater, didn’t get a screener, and then I mostly forgot about it. But it is December, damn it. Good film time. At some point it just clicked on me, I rushed out to gain a copy and watched it when I was ready to potentially feel depressed.
All I really had to do to prepare was to look at my college loans.
Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), a Jewish born boy, is heading off to college. He is leaving his home in New Jersey to go to a smaller college in Ohio, basically a different country, while his friends all go and sign up for the Korean war. Not Marcus though. He wants to be a lawyer. He wants to argue and show off his intelligence.
They immediately put him in a triple room with two other Jewish students, guys who didn’t join the one Jewish fraternity in a prominently Christian campus. How Christian? Well, the Dean (Tracy Letts) requires every student to go to a few of his sermons every year, not all of them, just about ten or so (I forgot), where he preaches for an hour on morality, rules, and more.
This is really just one of the problems Marcus finds himself in when he gets there. There begins to be problems with the roommates. And he meets a girl, Olicia (Sarah Gadon), who opens his eyes. And his trousers, as she is technically more experience than him and he really doesn’t know how to handle it. She does know how to handle it though, if you know what I mean.
Needless to say, college will change little Marcus, for the better, for the worse, it is hard to determine.
Also featuring Danny Burstein, Pico Alexander, and Linda Emond.
Just a car ride and chill, right?
This seems to have turned into an example of a poor, simple movie reviewer getting over hyped on very little amounts of detail. I expected a film full of arguments about religion and academia. About what it means to grow up Jewish. Maybe some antisemitism. Instead I received a regular drama film with a couple above average scenes.
Let’s go into some detail here. There was one main scene between Lerman and Letts’ characters, lasting maybe even twenty minutes, about how Logan’s character reacted and saw the world. If the whole film was packed full of scenes like that one, it would be fantastic. A nice serious drama with great dialogue.
There were also a few great scenes between Lerman and Gadon, on sexuality and may also be worth the price of admission. It just felt like the rest of the film fell flat.
I won’t call it boring, but I will say it feels incredibly lacking. A story is there, but one that never gets fully fleshed out. At 110 minutes, I feel like it could have cut out almost thirty and still given the same exact story.
Maybe there is something I am missing, but honestly, Indignation has turned into an incredibly disappointing film.