'INDIGNATION'........PHILIP ROTH'S NOT SO NIFTY FIFTIES.......

Indignation (2016)   Fair warning......writer-director James Schamus's adaptation of the Philip Roth novel can test your patience in its meticulous, studied and stately pacing.......it doesn't move, it cautiously proceeds, only after each individual scene makes its point....

             Schamus, the prolific independent film producer and University professor, has indeed made an Academic's  version of Roth's book...... about a quiet but fiercely liberal, free thinking Jewish scholarship student (Logan Lerman) who clashes with the repressive attitudes and cultural mores of 1951 America.  Most of the film plays as if meant to be studied, not watched........but when it catches fire, it's like nothing we've seen in the pure brilliance of its acting, writing and direction.......

             Lerman's Marcus Messner, whose college draft deferment protects him from service in the Korean War, finds himself a stranger in a strange land when he enrolls in a staunchly Christian university in Ohio.  Forced to attend the university's compulsory chapel services and generally chafing against the campus's 1950's conformity and anti-Semitism. Messner finds a ray of light in a romance with fellow student Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon).....a blonde, wealthy WASP  goddess, to be sure, .but a a deeply damaged soul, bearing the telltale scar of a slashed wrist..  She recognizes a fellow iconoclast in Marcus, but her own failed rebellions have unhinged her, leaving her adrift,finding only a small measure of solace first in liquor, and then, to Marcus's stunned confusion,in fellatio,,,,,,.

              A round peg who won't fit into a square hole, Marcus comes to the attention of the university's Dean (playwright-actor Tracy Letts)......and here we arrive at what makes this movie a must-watch, a bravura, sustained 15 minute verbal duel between Marcus and the Dean.....a spectacular clash of values, beliefs, opinions and worldviews that resonates today more than ever. The sequence functions as a kind of stunning one-act play built into the movie......the two actors spar, jab and parry at each other like duelists fighting to the death........and in this test of wills, you can see the harbingers of strife that will rip apart American society in the decades to come.....

               With no cinematic flourishes whatsoever, Schamus depends completely on his actors to tell this melancholic story and they put it across with a controlled force that holds you to the film even when it slows to a crawl. Anyone who values the kind of  the top-of-the-line acting and writing that can only be found these days in independent film should not pass this one up. 4 stars (****).