Indignation

The film opens on a medical dose about to be given an old woman in a care home, then shifts to a soldier -- years earlier -- dying in the Korean war. The body of the narrative explains how the two characters got there. As the young man asserts from the beginning, the apparently random sequence of events in life determined the causality of our lives. That randomness diffuses any rational basis. 

In 1951 going to college was a bright young man’s way to avoid the Korean War. Negotiating the double standard in sex was how a young American girl would survive and perhaps even succeed. 

The beautiful blonde shicksa Olivia and the brilliant earnest Jewish scholar Marcus end up far from their promised destinies. The particular cause proves a radical reflection upon current America, with a rampant hypocrisy, anti-intellectualism, and conformism as dangerous and stifling today as in 1951.  

When Marcus is expelled an ROTC unit parades on the campus in the background. That is, the college is no longer an alternative to war and the army but their representative. The borders between scholarship and war, humanity and violence, compassion and destruction have dissolved.  

This narrative is a tragedy. Bright, sensitive Marcus is expelled from the small Ohio college and the assertive but fragile Olivia suffers another breakdown that consigns her first to a mental institution, finally to the care home. To ensure her son’s abandonment of his love, Marcus’s mother returns to suffer her hateful marriage. His father finds his irrational dread about his son’s fate fulfilled. Everybody loses. 

And why? The culprit dean embodies the righteousness that destroyed the central characters’ love and lives — and continues to undermine America.  He propounds the essential values of the current Republicans. (As we know, any period piece is about the time it’s made as well as the time in which it is set. Why else tell that story now?)

In categorizing Marcus by his Jewishness, in his intolerance of different perspectives, in his puritanical fear of sex, and in the anti-intellectualism reflected in his attack on Bertrand Russell, the college dean is the retrogressive American anti-liberal. Actor Tracy Letts even looks like Dick Cheney.

As we need to believe, love conquers all. Just before dying Marcus remembers his recent brief romance with Olivia and ardently wishes she could know that at least that once, by him, she was loved. In the heat of war he can finally stop rejecting her for having pleased him. And love is the emotion missing from both their parents’ marriages. 

      As if by magic telepathy, when Olivia decades later smiles at the bouquet on the institution’s wallpaper she seems to be remembering him, their intimacies in the hospital, with the very awareness he had hoped for. But when Marcus is killed and Olivia’s memory is but a flicker in her dementia, that love hardly triumphs against the hypocrisy, ignorance and self-righteousness that separated the young couple when they tentatively entered maturity.  
Novelist Phillip Roth’s setting, Winesburg, Ohio, evokes the American pith in Sherwood Anderson’s classic short story collection of that title. Again, small lives illuminate the major currents in the nation’s psyche.
      Then there's the title, carried over from Roth's 2005 novel. All the major characters get indignant set pieces: Marcus railing at the school's chapel requirement and the dean's arrogance, the dean at Marcus's irreverence, the mother at the father's rage and the father at the world's dangers, and most movingly, Olivia's at Marcus's rejection of her for satisfying him.
      The latter may be the most powerful. The frat president's disdain for "the blow-job queen" points to the woman's dilemma in this double-standard society. Girls are expected to satisfy their guys but condemned as sluts if they do. Olivia's dilemma seems to have started with her abusive father who pays for her services -- "You forgot your allowance." -- but keeps hiding her away in institutions so she won't be an embarrassment. He implanted her driven need to please men -- and never being able to.
       As she arranges the flowers in Marcus's room she tells him how vulnerable her sensitivity makes her, how pained her very existence. She is the most attractive character in the film, the most sensitive and also the most self-aware. As the time-leaping narrative frame stresses, she's the only survivor.
      Yet she's also the film's one irretrievably damaged character, abused and rejected despite her position of privilege, the golden gentile in Roth's Jewish-centered world. One shot eloquently captures Roth's sympathy for her. From Marcus's perspective at his hospital window we get the long shot down -- the god's eye view -- on his mother's parting from Olivia. It's a banishment as surely as her demand Marcus dump her. After his mother's rigid words and handshake Olivia hobbles away, broken again. That's our last sight of the girl.
      The overall indignation may be Roth's. How better to respond to a society that seems to be deliberately regressing to the prejudices, sexism, fears and inhumanity we supposedly outgrew since the frigid fifties.