About a boy | 17 November 2016

Indignation is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 novel and amazingly, for an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel — see the recent dog’s dinner that was American Pastoral, for example — it may even be worth two hours of your time. (Depending on what you would otherwise be doing with that time; I wouldn’t wish for you to cancel that hip operation or similar.)

It stars Logan Lerman as Marcus Messner, a 19-year-old Jewish boy from Newark who, in 1951, escapes the Korean war and the over-anxious clutches of his parents by winning a scholarship to a college in Ohio. Marcus, at the outset, is a good Jewish boy — an exemplary Jewish boy. Marcus is the Jewish boy you would want if you happened to be in the market for a Jewish boy. He is super-bright, serious, a straight-A student. Marcus and his parents (his father is a butcher) are determined he will make it to law school, and there is no reason to imagine he won’t.