When it comes to Philip Roth – one of the most celebrated authors since, well, ever – the track record of film adaptations of his work isn’t exactly gleaming.
Adapting any novel for the screen is a weird mix of creativity and surgery, and for a debut director to take on the task is almost asking for trouble. Yet Indignation, helmed by veteran producer and long-time Ang Lee collaborator James Schamus, handles this transition with great subtlety and grace. It also doesn’t hurt that Schamus turns out to be a junkie for story.
“I love stories with the protagonists who are a little hard to pin down, much like the rest of us,” Schamus says. He is speaking from New York, home to Roth himself, among innumerable other cultural icons. “Often they’re going against the grain of what you’d think a protagonist in a narrative motion picture should be these days. They tend to be not all sweetness and light. My heart somehow goes out to those kinds of protagonists. Indignation is funny, because I have this lead character that Philip Roth gave me who I really empathise with, and I hope others do too. He’s super smart, he’s got this great life ahead of him, and on the other hand I thought it was really interesting that a lot of the narrative is built around the fact that the guy doesn’t actually understand what the hell is going on at all. Especially with this young woman he’s falling in love with.”
The young man in this instance – the focused and flawed Marcus – is played by Logan Lerman; the young woman, Olivia, is brought to vivid life by Sarah Gadon. Their relationship forms the spine of a story set in a 1950s university campus, which also features Tracy Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, as Dean Caudwell. Midway through the film, a battle of words occurs between Caudwell and Marcus, and it’s one of the strongest moments of dialogue put to screen in ages. Once again though, having Roth as your source material is a tremendous boon, even if it must be substantially reconfigured.
“Novels of any depth and any artistry are going to have such nuance and such pleasure, even in the workings of the language that they use to paint pictures, that we can’t do in cinema,” says Schamus. “We only have the camera, and the people in front of it. The sounds, the image. We don’t have the interior space of … the author’s voice, the ability to digress. So cinema is a bit more of a blunt instrument, on the one hand. On the other hand, it does allow the revelry and the emotion that comes with the image. We also have the added benefit of the human face, the landscape that really gives you an almost infinite palette to mobilise the story.
“So Indignation has an enormous amount of the usual condensation, but more importantly for adapting, I have to say, this is a little different to other Roth books. It’s his 29th novel, and he is writing in a certain more elegiac and fable-like way, and gives us a simpler path from the voice on the page to the life of the characters. I thought I had an easier job of it than other folk who have tried to adapt Roth.”
Though both film and novel have moments of humour and exhilaration (the story does a remarkable job of capturing the fumbling evolution from teenagedom into adulthood), Indignation is never far from tragedy. There is suicide, rejection, grief, and the Korean War rages just outside the safe confines of the university. Most poignant is the character arc of Olivia – a woman we come to empathise with quite strongly, and whose departure from the story comes entirely unexpectedly.
“She disappears in the novel and leaves no trace,” Schamus explains. “I know this is pointing towards interpretation and adaptation, which I think is part of the process, but I was very moved by the fact that Roth was writing a novel in his mid-’70s, right? He’s looking back to when he was a young man, and clearly there was a young woman then who somehow is speaking out to him after all these years, that he still feels the need to connect with.
“It’s not an autobiography; Marcus Messner is not Philip Roth. But Philip Roth did go to college in 1951, and he did have a rather, shall we say ‘interesting’ first date with somebody. But he’s posing a version of himself who was of course blind to this young woman, and what she’s going through, completely heedless, frankly, of her own pain and trauma. And in old age, he’s crafting a version of her that he’s finally understood, that he’s finally seeing. So I felt that she did survive in that way. I think she had a life. I don’t know what it was, but she lived a life, and she survived.”
Indignation is a fine film, an adaptation that succeeds where so many others have failed. The reason for this is Schamus’ willingness to not hold Roth’s work as sacrosanct, but as an empty stage that needs filling.
“I was talking to Logan, [who] was saying, ‘How are we going to shoot all these words?’ I said, ‘The script is the floor. The actors are the dancers moving across it. I want to shoot the dance – I don’t want to shoot the floor.’”
Indignation (dir. James Schamus) is in cinemas Thursday August 18.
