ALL THAT GLITTERS

ALL THAT GLITTERS

          Greed may be good, as we have been told by the financial wheelers and dealers who inform us of the benefits of that incentive to capitalism, though ignoring much of its consequences.  Greed also apparently inspires the film industry, not only in its own quest for profits, but as the subject of a number of recent films.  The two versions of Wall Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short all displayed several aspects of the process by which people who essentially perform no real job beyond making money make money.

Gold, the latest venture into that process, once again loosely based on an actual story, shows the ups and downs of a complicated operation to mine gold from the jungles of Indonesia.  The son of a former prospector in the American West, Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey), after undergoing a boom and a bust in his business, learns of the exploits of a skilled mining engineer, Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), who searches for valuable metals.  He hocks all his valuables to fly to Indonesia and enlist Acosta in a gold mining operation, which occupies most of the movie’s action.  For some time, predictably, the miners find no gold, they run out of money to pay their workers, and the corrupt government intervenes; the partners have to give the president’s son a piece of the action to sustain their enterprise.

Once the scheme begins to pay off, however, a major Wall Street firm offers to buy into what may turn out to be the biggest gold strike in history.  Kenny Wells becomes the major player in the gold market, a hero of the industry, and a greedy consumer of the benefits of sudden wealth.  Naturally, for complicated reasons, the whole business collapses, a number of high rollers find themselves broke, and legal questions bring in the FBI.

The real point of the film, apart from its familiar salutary lessons in the dangers of unbridled lust for wealth, belongs with the person of the star, who appears in almost every scene.  Apparently bent on stretching himself in many directions, in Gold Matthew McConaughey assumes a very different look and persona from his previous roles.  After playing the emaciated cowboy of Dallas Buyers Club, the soft-spoken psychopath of Killer Joe, even the smooth dude of those Lincoln commercials, for the part of Kenny Wells he added what looks like at least 50 pounds, took off a lot of hair, and adopted some ugly prosthetic dentures.  (The sacrifices one makes for art!) 

Although possibly authentic, those transformations and McConaughey’s excessively enthusiastic performance hardly turn Kenny Wells into a charismatic salesman for his golden cause.  The frequent closeups of his sweating, puffy face and unfortunate teeth become something less than inspirational as the picture progresses.  The scenes of this corpulent man wandering around with his protruding belly looming over his tighty whiteys or emerging from a hot tub stark raving naked are not entirely pleasant to look upon.

Aside from the sometimes excessive energy McConaughey pours into his role and his willingness to appear somewhat less than attractive, the movie mostly works best when it shows the large mining operation in Indonesia, the actual work of the people, and the lush jungles that provide the setting.  Its ambiguous and puzzling conclusion tends to subvert its exploration of its popular and relevant subject, its motivations and consequences.  As it turns out, greed triumphs once again.  

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

          Several years ago an entertainment reporter from a newspaper (in Texas I think), called me up to ask about recent trends in film.  I inferred that he wanted me to say something about explosions, rocket blasts, car chases, superheroes, computer generated images, and all the other gimmickry that so many people mistake for movie making.  Instead,  I  told him that American pictures now and then showed signs of waking up to the heritage of literary works like Winesburg, Ohio, examining something of  the dreariness, loneliness, and emptiness of small towns and small lives, the drab underside of American life that seldom appears in the glossiness of Hollywood cinema.  (Of course, that conclusion ignores all those flicks about young people straying into some little Southern town inhabited by inbred cannibals eager for new, preferably college educated nourishment).  Surprisingly, he seemed uninterested after that.

          Perhaps beginning back with The Last Picture Show, the industry occasionally turns away from the sentimental vision of works like It’s a Wonderful Life, one of my personal nonfavorites, and explores something darker and sadder in movies like All the Real Girls, The Good Girl, Beautiful Girls, Monster’s Ball, Sling Blade, even About Schmidt, which if it strays from the small town, retains some of the great American vision of disillusion and disappointment out there in flyover country.  In the midst of the holiday season, when the multiplexes explode in fireworks and sophisticated technology positively leaps from the screen, a rather modest, low-key film inspired garlands of superlatives and generous sprinklings of exclamation points, and has already won some of those bogus prizes that the industry employs to praise itself.  The movie, Manchester by the Sea, tells a very simple story that reflects an understanding of the sad poetry of ordinary life, the impossible situations we often occupy, the problems we struggle and often fail to solve. 

It uses a series of flashbacks to explain something of its present, but mostly stays within the narrow boundaries of its main character’s life.  Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), who works as the superintendent for a handful of apartment buildings in Quincy, Massachusetts, must handle the difficulties created by the sudden death of his older brother Joe back in his hometown of Manchester by the Sea.  And that’s about it, that’s the whole subject of the film.  Throughout the movie Lee attempts to figure out the next steps in his life and form some sort of relationship with his brother’s sixteen-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges).  In the process those flashbacks reveal the tragedy that in effect chased Lee out of his home town and created the sad emptiness of his present life.  A drunk and a brawler who steadfastly resists even the slightest human connection, whether from a woman in a bar, the mother of his nephew’s girlfriend, or even his ex-wife eager for some communication, Lee excludes anyone who attempts to penetrate the carapace that surrounds his pain and protects him from the world. 

The performances rhyme with the subjects and rhythms of the film, so that the mostly working class people seem completely real, not acting so much as living their mostly drab, awkward, ordinary lives.  Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler in a remarkable series of understated conversations and odd silences, only occasionally allowing the combustion inside his spirit to flame out in anger and violence.  The whole cast matches him perfectly, especially Lucas Hedges as his nephew Patrick and Michelle Williams as his ex-wife, who shares his tragedies and heartbreak but cannot enter the prison he has constructed for himself.

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, who clearly knows the place and its people, the movie works on every level, so that its frequent establishing shots of the actual town of Manchester by the Sea signal a brief, seamless glimpse of the past or provide a bridge between scenes and sequences.  Perhaps too literal and deliberate at times, it nevertheless creates a world where everyone apparently suffers some terrible loss, some failure of love, some bleak prospect of an unsatisfactory life ahead.  The script offers no solutions and refuses to settle for any easy answers to its problems, some neat closure of its action, which explains how really unusual a film Lonergan has made, a slice of life more authentic than just about every other motion picture now playing.

RULES DON’T APPLY

         As Warren Beatty’s new movie Rules Don’t Apply demonstrates, Donald Trump is not the first loony billionaire to entrance the media; though undoubtedly smarter than the Great Creamsicle, Howard Hughes was also crazier.  Like Trump, however, he advertised his exploits loud and often; the heir to a great industry; he designed and flew airplanes, produced movies, and collected a stable of starlets.   Martin Scorsese’s Aviator dealt with Hughes in his most successful years, when he was a Hollywood legend and dated, among others, Katharine Hepburn.  Beatty’s movie, which stars him as Hughes, concentrates mostly on his later years as his eccentricities declined into insanity.

Despite serving as the central character, Beatty only sporadically appears, mostly as a strange figure in the background of a burgeoning love between one of his drivers detailed to chauffeur one of his aspiring actresses.  Lily Collins plays Marla Mabrey, who comes to Hollywood with her mother (Annette Bening) for a promised screen test.  Hughes supplies her with her own house, her own driver/watcher, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), so she can follow a daily routine that, frustratingly, never actually culminates in the test.  Neither she nor Frank even meets their employer until well into the movie, when they must deal with his manifold idiosyncratic practices and demands.

In addition to the generally insipid relationship between the two young people, the film shows some of Hughes’s general lunacy—paying his gaggle of hopeful performers by dangling envelopes of cash from upper story windows, insisting on flying (and crashing) an untested airplane, his famous wooden flying boat, his purchase of all supplies of banana nut ice cream, his expectation of a ticker tape parade in Washington, where no buildings tall enough for such an event exist, his constant screening of his great hit Hell’s Angels, etc., etc.—which grows less and less interesting as the movie progresses.  Rules Don’t Apply also features a whole constellation of stars of various magnitudes—Matthew Broderick, Paul Sorvino, Amy Madigan, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Oliver Platt (I may have missed a few), possibly all friends of Beatty.

The movie runs quite long, perhaps to accommodate all those players, repeats itself endlessly, and turns a perhaps once interesting personality into a mercurial eccentric who mumbles uninteresting lines and mostly dwells in darkness.  Nobody seems in the least compelling, including the central character, and very little in the film makes it worth watching.  One of the rules that Beatty doesn’t apply is the obligation to make the story, the people, and the action watchable, an obligation he overlooked in Rules Don’t Apply.

         

ARRIVAL

ARRIVAL

          Ever since Stanley Kubrick’s ponderous, pretentious epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, back in 1968, the science fiction film, too often the object of highbrow sneers, acquired a certain dignity.  All those wonderful old B flicks about invaders from outer space and flying saucers manned by hideous creatures from distant planets bent on the destruction of mankind evolved into more, occasionally thoughtful explorations of those popular subjects, alien encounters, robots, time travel, and the future.  Some movies with similar aspirations to high art include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and AI Artificial Intelligence; Steven Spielberg directed all three, and the third derived from a planned Kubrick adaptation.

The concept of the alien encounter, whether in a mission from Earth, as in Aliens, or by extraterrestrial visitors to this planet, provides probably the most important and most common subject for science fiction.  Those visitors vary between the benign and helpful, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still, or much more often, frightening and hostile—The Thing From Another World, Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Puppet Masters, Independence Day, etc., etc., etc.  One of the major problems in that encounter, the difficult process of mere communication, the need to know the intentions of the visitors, forms the central preoccupation of the new science fiction film Arrival.   

Instead of the usual flying saucers (thanks, Roswell, New Mexico) crewed by the little green men beloved by alien abduction veterans, in Arrival the spaceships are huge half domes that hover on edge, twelve of which have landed in various places all over the world.  Their crew—the movie shows only two creatures—resembles gigantic octopuses, though with seven tentacles and no apparent eyes or mouths.  Led by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), the army sets up an expansive military village around the ship, and links up with similar constructions at the other locations in other countries.  Weber enlists Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a professor of linguistics, to find some way of communicating with the visitors.

As usual in science fiction films that deal with alien encounters, the puzzle presented by the visitors creates a dangerous conflict in the reactions of the various countries, including the United States.  While some, in the scientific community of course, want to find out all they can about them—where they came from, how they got here, what do they want, and so on--many frightened government leaders and their military forces want to attack them, even threatening nuclear bombs.  Louise Banks and her physicist colleague Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) naturally want their research to continue as far and as deep as they can conduct it.  That division of interpretation and purpose leads to the most important crisis in the movie.

She and Donnelly undergo the difficult preparations for ascending in a gravity-free tunnel and a possibly poisonous atmosphere inside the space ship to confront the aliens through a transparent wall.  The creatures “speak” by squirting a kind of ink in circular patterns, which through the sort of fascinating process that film shows so well, the linguist manages to decipher.   Whether valid or not, her explorations of possible meanings, the charts she creates, the solutions she reaches all share their own inherent appeal. 

Her own process of enlightenment grows out of the belief that learning a new language actually changes the human brain; as a result, she begins to share some of the thinking of the aliens and to participate in their peculiar sense of nonlinear time.  She even experiences physical changes, some connected to the notion that learning a new language in some way rewires the brain.  Her contact with the extraterrestrials enables her to communicate with other humans in ways she doesn’t even understand.  Through flashbacks and flash forwards, the movie shows the merging of past, present, and future, demonstrating the nonlinear nature of time, so that the linguist in effect paradoxically “remembers” the future.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Arrival succeeds on many levels, fusing the personal history and context of its protagonist with the desperate struggle to avert violence and, best of all, simply to learn as much as possible.  Even in its use of familiar subjects and themes of the genre, the film’s version of the alien encounter presents some entirely new meanings and possibilities, with a refreshing reliance on the intellect and some compelling ideas about linguistics itself.  Along with its intelligent use of some inventive material, its massive space ship, the huge military encampment surrounding it, the extremely unusual creatures, the large cast, the special effects all combine to place it among the most memorable science fiction films.  It may well become a classic.

THE ACCOUNTANT

THE ACCOUNTANT

          In many ways, The Accountant might qualify as the most unlikely movie of the year, at least so far (there’s always plenty of time left for more comic book flicks, complete with the usual complement of shootouts, fireworks and computer generated imaging).  To begin with, the notion of a film about an accountant, hardly the most exciting or glamorous of professions, hardly seems a promising cinematic subject.  In addition, though responsible for numerous suspicious activities, as Hollywood’s own history of “creative” accounting demonstrates, accountants, unlike lawyers, have flown under the radar, barely attracting public attention of any kind; they probably still labor under the image of a numbers nerd wearing a green eye shade cooking the books for someone.

          Nevertheless, the new movie makes both the process and the protagonist fascinating.  Ben Affleck plays the title character, Christian Wolff, who owns a tiny office in a drab strip mall in Illinois; the first time we see him at work, he helps a couple with their income taxes, saving their farm from foreclosure.  Like some superhero, however, under various pseudonyms in another identity he performs much more lucrative and interesting work for a variety of questionable clients—Arab despots, Mafia bosses, terrorist networks—apparently helping them to hide and launder their money.  The job that functions as the central situation of the film involves his specialty, forensic accounting, investigating the disappearance of many millions of dollars from a firm that manufactures prostheses. 

          As Wolff pursues clues to the loss, the Treasury Department begins its own investigation of his activities, based on footage of his meetings with various international clients and their own forensic accounting.  Much of the film’s appeal  derives from two parallel investigative tracks, one showing Wolff’s gradual entanglement in the terribly violent outcome of his work, the other the pursuit by the Treasury agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) and her boss, Ray King (J. K. Simmons).  The sheer process, the details of the ways in which the two alternating quests work, complete with computer analysis, videotape recordings, criminal histories, the specific methods of research and the related back stories of the important individuals combine to create a most compelling narrative.

          Those back stories enrich much of the picture’s surface, fleshing out characters, solving some mysteries, and ultimately tying all the people together.  Christian Wolff is a high functioning autistic, as he tells Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), the young woman who first blew the whistle on the missing money, and who complicates his life in some unexpected ways.  The movie shows flashbacks to his childhood, which explain his personality and behavior and provide substantial evidence for the peculiar skills he brings to his profession beyond his knowledge of financial wheeling and dealing.

          Maintaining a stoic deadpan throughout the movie, speaking mostly in a clipped monotone, and steadfastly avoiding any affect, Ben Affleck accomplishes a kind of tour de force in the role of the autistic accountant, an odd achievement in a thriller to begin with, and a difficult task for any actor.  In a couple of moments his disability even creates comedy, which of course means nothing to him, since his emotional range cannot stretch that far.

          In showing the histories of several other characters the film links all of them together, either through the commonality of their professions, relationships, or mere chance; it actually suggests that its world in fact operates on a series of apparently coincidental events that connect everybody, most of them finding a nexus in the accountant himself.  Its final sequences solve a continuing puzzle that generates most of the violent action recurring throughout its length, drawing in almost everyone, especially its protagonist.  The script demonstrates quite a lot of ingenuity in those connections between apparently unrelated incidents and people and its resolution of some surprising mysteries.  Without a great deal of publicity and despite its cryptic title, The Accountant apparently is winning audiences and, surprisingly, turns out to be one of the most exciting movies of the current season.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

          Based on the best-selling thriller by Paula Hawkins, which currently floods the bookstores, The Girl on the Train should command a ready-made audience. The book also employs a most cinematic structure, which should make it smoothly adaptable.  It uses multiple narrators and points of view, jumps backward and forward in time, and a unifying symbol, the commuter train that runs through all the action, unites the characters, and provides both symbol and basis for the central situation.  Even the transplantation from England to America presents no particular problems for the script.

          A depressed, alcoholic young woman named Rachel (Emily Blunt), who’s lost her job because of her drinking, still rides the train from Westchester to Manhattan every day, mostly because she doesn’t know what else to do with her sad life.  The train passes near her former house, where her ex-husband lives with his new wife and baby daughter, and by another, where she observes an attractive, loving couple, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans).  Those people and their lives represent all that she has lost and cannot ever regain, an apparent happiness that she will never know.

          Through flashbacks and cuts from one couple to another, as well as through Rachel’s point of view, the picture unfolds several stories, which frequently differ from Rachel’s interpretation of people and events.  Because of her often inebriated condition, her emotional fragility from her divorce, her fantasies about the perfect couple she sees every day, her confused memory, she becomes the perfect example of an unreliable narrator.  When Megan disappears, the police investigate and question Rachel about her vague reports of seeing the missing woman getting into a car during one of her periods of drunkenness; as her story grows more confusing she involves Scott, her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), and his wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).

          As the various narrative threads and characters intertwine, a solution to the mystery begins to emerge and along with it, revelations of a truth that none of the characters previously understood.  The apparent reality dissolves under Rachel’s increasing comprehension of what actually happened and who abducted Megan.  Those revelations in effect solve the mystery but also suggest a kind of shared guilt—all of the people bear a painful burden from their respective pasts, which influences their actions and their plight and leads to the tragedy in the film.

          The multiple points of view maintain the sense of the difference between appearance and reality, and lend some energy to a regrettably uneven narrative pace.  The director, Tate Taylor, employs a great many tight close-ups of characters’ faces, a technique that may initially suit the style and content of the film, but gradually grows both visually and thematically overstated and rather wearying.  He also tends to repeat shots and scenes beyond a kind of necessary limit, so the movie often seems to be showing the same people and action over and over.

Beneath the surface of its mystery, The Girl on the Train ultimately fits right into the contemporary version of that old standby, the chick flick.  Beyond its focus on the major characters, the three connected women, it shows that the male characters are either inadequate weaklings or cruel betrayers.  Despite their victimization, the women essentially triumph, even in a final bloody act of violence, but the picture is honest enough to show that their victories create a certain ambiguity; nobody finally earns genuine happiness or even satisfaction, and several lives, if not ruined, have been drastically altered.  In a sense, the movie suggests that everyone hides some secret, that everyone is guilty of something.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

            Based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, the original Magnificent Seven may be the first ensemble Western, employing a whole group of actors, some of them with distinguished careers, rather than a single dominant star.  The movie spawned three sequels and a television series and possibly influenced a couple of others with similar concepts of plot and character, most notably The Professionals and The Wild Bunch. 

The picture follows the simple plot of its predecessor, showing the gathering of a disparate group of gunfighters under the leadership of a special individual, in this case a bounty hunter named Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), to fight against an evil man oppressing a whole village full of innocent people.  The bad guy in question, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), terrorizes a small community to keep his gold mine poisoning the air and water, and employs an army of thugs to kill anyone who opposes him; in an early sequence that reveals his character and methods, he announces his takeover of the town, punctuating his speech by ordering his men to execute some of the people who protest.

One citizen, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) resolving to take revenge on Bogue and release her town from his grip, hires Chisolm for the job; as it turns out, he also has a serious score to settle with the tyrant.  He recruits six other men who then travel with him to help defend the town against Bogue and his men.  They defeat the deputies Bogue has installed to keep everyone in his thrall, train the inept citizens in marksmanship, free the apparently enslaved miners, and erect a series of defenses against the anticipated attack, which ultimately involves a whole army of Bogue’s thugs and a devastating Gatling gun.  The movie thus follows a predictable but reasonably entertaining pattern, and we all know that, despite the odds against them and the obstacles they face, the Seven will somehow prevail. 

The Magnificent Seven should also satisfy any student of the Western, that great American form, in its deployment of several of its obligatory devices.  Aside from all the gunplay, it features, for example, the poker game, the saloon fight, the whorehouse (dance hall in the old days, when those cowboys really loved to dance), the rite of passage from cowardice to courage in peaceful townspeople.  A couple of times the director, Antoine Fuqua, uses that familiar long panorama shot of a rider or group of riders traversing a vast and empty landscape, and now and then he employs the techniques of the spaghetti Westerns, with tight close-ups of faces, long silences, and an eye-level camera.

Its most problematic elements involve the actors themselves, the group who constitute that Magnificent Seven.  Aside from Denzel Washington, the movie lacks the kind of strong presences who command attention in the original—people like Ethan Hawke and someone named Chris Pratt simply cannot match Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Eli Wallach, and Charles Bronson.  Washington himself underplays throughout, sometimes almost whispering his lines; in one of a few anachronisms, he speaks of a “worst case scenario,” a phrase I doubt ever was uttered in 1879.

The generally awful Vincent D’Onofrio balances Washington, simply chewing up the prairie as the largest and loudest member of the Seven.  The only unusual addition comes in the form of a Chinese expert, Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), who throws knives and darts, some of which he stores in his hair, with deadly accuracy.  Peter Sarsgaard plays the evil Bartholomew Bogue with a chillingly soft spoken delivery, making a little speech equating his savage actions with both democracy and Christianity (sound familiar?).  He commits a couple of actions that perfectly establish his character—when his tame sheriff brings him bad news, he simply shoots the messenger.  Worst of all, in the early sequence where he first appears, he sets fire to the church: holy smoke.

WAR DOGS

TWO NOT SO GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS

            Based on actual people and events, War Dogs tells a most unusual story of two young dopes who more or less fall into the highly profitable international arms trade.  Not surprisingly, the movie provides a salutary lesson in greed, but also shows something of the actual wheeling and dealing in that tricky and often dangerous business.  As both life and the movies teach us, easy  pickings, sure things, and double crossing often lead to disaster, which is what happens when a couple of moral morons involve themselves with guns and find themselves playing with the big boys in a game they don’t fully comprehend. 

            The two friends in War Dogs, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who knew each other in their adolescent years, reconnect when Efraim returns to Florida, partially bankrolled by his uncle (Kevin Pollak), full of ambitions to make a killing in the arms business. He enlists his friend and the two of them embark on their first big deal, attempting to supply an American colonel in Iraq with a truckload of Beretta pistols (why the colonel must acquire the weapons on his own remains a mystery).  The job turns out to be complicated and exceedingly dangerous, involving crossing several borders in the Middle East and surviving an attack from the Taliban.

            As they sink deeper or perhaps rise higher into their new business, the partners accumulate the usual trappings of wealth in today’s America—expensive cars, fancy apartments, a plenitude of drugs.  They also find themselves connected to some heavy hitters, who actually perform a little hitting on Packouz.  Ultimately they land in some difficult territory, partly as a result of diving in over their heads and partly as a result of Efraim’s penchant for double crossing

and back stabbing.  When he stiffs an Albanian partner in a particularly intricate scheme, he and his partner become the target of an FBI investigation.

            In starring Jonah Hill, the director, Todd Phillips capitalizes on some of his work in The Wolf of Wall Street as a crooked, greedy, drug-addled wheeler dealer.  In War Dogs he adds to that image through adding a good deal of plain nastiness and a sort of generalized vulgarity to all his words and actions.  His employs his corpulence, his obnoxious mannerisms, his steady line of profane bluster to good effect, so much so that Miles Teller, though nominally the protagonist and occasional narrator, fades away when they occupy the same scene.  For better or worse, Hill dominates the picture, which generally grows less interesting when he’s absent.  A fascinating story in itself, War Dogs loses much of its appeal in its failure to balance its violence and tension with its sometimes outrageous comedy, summed up perfectly in Jonah Hill’s character.

INDIGNATION

INDIGNATION

          Although he has officially retired from writing—and who could blame him, it’s a tough racket, after all, and he’s had a good run—Philip Roth can still enjoy the lucrative benefits of film adaptation.  The latest Roth novel to make it to the screen, Indignation, actually seems a rather odd choice.  (Frankly, though I consider myself well-read and have read most of Roth’s novels, I have never even heard of this one.)  The new movie uses some material familiar to any reader of his works—Jewish American domestic life, anti-Semitism, the difficulty of assimilation , sexual initiation, and in this case, the fish-out-of-water situation of a Jewish student from New Jersey attending a deeply Protestant college in Ohio.

          The student, Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), the son of a kosher butcher, attends the wonderfully named Winesburg College in Ohio, where he encounters a number of new experiences, all of which turn out badly.  An excellent student and captain of his high school baseball team, Marcus wants only to study and learn, ambitions constantly thwarted by a series of personal and academic obstacles.   He resents the compulsory chapel attendance, the efforts of the Jewish fraternity to pledge him, and his two obnoxious roommates.  Although he captained his high school baseball team, he even refuses to try out for the Winesburgers. 

          When Marcus meets a young woman named Olivia (Sarah Gadon), his troubles and confusions compound.  On their first date, she provides him with the sort of sexual thrill freshmen in the 1950s can only dream about, which causes him to react in some unpredictable ways, and leads to a series of other problems.  His innocence in a way obstructs his understanding of whatever relationship could develop, and he fails to comprehend Olivia’s own difficulties.

          The real meat of the picture, oddly, consists of a series of dialogues between Marcus and the dean of the college (Tracy Letts), a thoroughly obnoxious academic who attempts to discover and correct everything he finds wrong in Marcus’s attitude and behavior.  Dean Caudwell, a kind of compendium of every dean you or I ever encountered in college, constantly badgers Marcus, delving into his background, religious beliefs, dating habits, and even his quite understandable desire to move from his crowded three-student room to a single.  Their dialogues go on for far too long and grow increasingly disturbing, which may account for the film’s otherwise odd and dubious title.

          A picture that starts and ends strangely, Indignation for the most part concentrates on the perfectly interesting subject of its protagonist’s struggles with a new and different situation.  It begins to disintegrate in effect with Marcus’s puzzled reaction to Olivia, his talky meetings with Dean Caudwell, and an attack of appendicitis that brings his mother out to Winesburg; that visit leads to greater disillusionment for Marcus and further problems in his relationship with Olivia.  Ultimately, a movie that proceeds with a certain clarity, simplicity, and reason finally ends, almost shockingly, in madness, despair, and death.