Set in1951, the movie tells the story of Marcus (Logan Lerman), a working-class Jewish student from New Jersey, who falls for a young woman (Sarah Gadon) while clashing with his dean (Tracy Letts) in 1951 Ohio.
James Schamus, the longtime maverick film producer who co-wrote many of Ang Lee's films, adapts the 2008 Philip Roth novel and directs this measured, serious, heavily introspective coming-of-age drama.
The period detail is reverent, every sweater and side-parting just-so. Yet the stifling design makes a good fit for the airless world in which Marcus is marooned, and the reminders of darkness and death at the edge of the film relieve the prettiness.
Schamus gets the suffocating look of 1951 American academia just right, with its sweaters and skirts, and with a rose motif worthy of Citizen Kane. What's missing is any real drama or purpose.
With its mature perspective on distant formative years, the film feels true to the spirit of Roth; little from the deep wellsprings of the great novelist's fiction is lost in translation.
Writer and director James Schamus turns Indignation into a minor period piece, a precise but seemingly pointless evocation of the stultifying conventionalism of an American university campus in the 1950s.
