Disgrace: Review By harveycritic

DISGRACE

Paladin

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B+

Directed by: Steve Jacobs

Written By: Anna-Maria Monticelli, from J.M. Coetzee’s novel

Cast: John Malkovich, Jessica Haines, Eriq Ebouaney, Fiona Press, Antoinette Engel, Natalie Becker

Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 8/11/09

Opens: September 18, 2009

Some people on the political left are fond of saying, in effect, “The bill for past injustices is due and must be paid now by the former oppressors.” We see this reversal of roles particularly on the African continent, where not a single land still exists under colonial rule. In some African countries the whites have fared poorly, thrown off their land as in Zimbabwe. In another, the Republic of South Africa, political figures have long stated that whites are welcome to stay, though they are now a submerged minority of some fifteen percent or less. “Disgrace,” Steve Jacobs’s film adapted for the screen by Anna-Maria Monticelli from J.M. Coetzee’s highly lauded novel, tells a story about post-apartheid South Africa as seen largely by a self-absorbed professor of Romantic literature who gets his comeuppance, seeks redemption, and ultimately can look in the mirror and see himself as he actually is.

This is not a film for those who like their movies to “move.” The pace is slow, the music as spare as is the prose in J.M. Coetzee’s book. I’m told that the film has not strayed much from the novel, a particularly adept job considering that Coetzee is not big on dialogue. With a stunning, largely restrained piece of acting from John Malkovich, “Disgrace” works its way into our souls, giving us a better understanding of race relations and South African history than a doc*mentary or a straight-history text might do. We’d expect both blacks and whites to be incensed: both races are disgraced.

In the story, David Lurie (John Malkovich), a man who grinds out lessons on 19th century British poetry as though by rote and receiving, in return, the bored stares of his students, is a 52-year-old divorced fellow who probably spent too much time reading Lord Byron. Considering himself a Casanova but one who is unsure in his middle age of his sexual magnetism, he seduces a pretty mixed-race student, Melanie (Antoinette Engel), inviting her for a drink, to his bed, even to a fancy restaurant in Capetown facing the ocean. Called before a panel hearing charges of this apparently illicit liaison, he pleads guilty as though considering himself above the judges on the panel, and takes off from his sophisticated world to an almost deserted farm on the Eastern Cape. There, his daughter, Lucy (Jessica Haines), lives a simple life in charge of a kennel for stray and unwanted dogs, making a living by selling flowers in the marketplace. After a brutal attack by three black men, David’s confidence, already fragile, is shattered, particularly since his daughter refuses to press charges.

Father and daughter, professor and farmer, have been living in the same country in two different worlds. At the top of the heap during South Africa’s apartheid (segregation of the races), they face a turning of the tables, a setting understood and accepted with resignation by Lucy, who contrary to Western thought refuses to move to Holland where she could be safe. She is to make her piece with the political volte-face with unusual intentions for her black assistant, Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney).

As one critic notes about the novel, “It has the right mix of timelessness and decay” and is about “the harsh cleansing of humiliation and the regretfulness of knowing things.”

The movie, as spare as the book (with an intense scene involving rape and savagery and violence against dogs), serves as politics, sociology, and most of all as an absorbing and therefore entertaining piece.

Unrated. 118 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online