James Schamus’s film Indignation is a memorable, thought-provoking and haunting adaptation of Philip Roth’s noteworthy novel. He manages to preserve Roth’s engrossing mix of campus humor with looming death and conflict. The film is flawlessly produced and perfectly cast, but does it also subvert the novel’s assault on religion and 1950s college mores?

A kosher butcher’s son from Newark, the brilliant and athletic Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman) is off to a small Ohio college even as high school friends are dying in the Korean War. The store in which Marcus works with his father Max (Danny Burstein) serves a quasi-religious role in the community, to the extent that the bereaved mother of a fallen classmate inquires how Marcus will keep kosher in Ohio.

Until he leaves for college Marcus’s greatest worry is being seen as undignified. He is embarrassed that female classmates have a bus stop view of him cleaning garbage cans outside the store. When he asks his father to relieve him of that duty, Dad responds that all he has to be ashamed of is stealing.

In Newark, Marcus is rooted in hard work and good values and, it seems, in the synagogue. Schamus departs from the novel by showcasing a (weekday?) synagogue service at which the grieving father of the fallen Korean War soldier recites the Mourners’ Kaddish. But according to Jewish tradition, that prayer is said the first week (shiva) at home services (except on the Sabbath), so the synagogue setting is unnecessary here. Why include it?

Perhaps the synagogue scene is intended to foreshadow that Marcus is spared the dangers of war because, along with full scholarship to the college he receives, as we shall learn from his dean, a stipend from his “temple.” Does that “temple” represents more than “equal time” vis-a-vis the college chapel, which becomes important to the plot. Both become deadly backdrops that propel the dignified Marcus into stifling indignation-provoking scenarios. There is no mention of a synagogue scholarship in the novel. Did Schamus superimpose the synagogue to represent equal questioning of religions, and also, mirabile dictu, the questioning of such questioning?

At the college Marcus learns that he has been assigned a room with the only two other Jewish men on campus who opted out of the Jewish fraternity. He works hard and yet cares enough about the subject matter to raise pointed questions in class. In the one history class highlighted, the professor speaks of a “halfway covenant” in the Puritan church through which nonbelievers could be members of the community subject to the same scrutiny as everyone else. Is Schamus providing in this supplement to the novel a precedent usable to challenge the novel’s would-be assault on “parietal” (Roth’s word) Christian disciplines?

Always in the library, both studying and working there, Marcus keeps his nose to the academic grindstone, but his eyes can’t help being distracted by the shapely legs of Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon), a blond Gentile student, whom he promptly asks for a date. The kosher butcher’s son chooses a fancy French restaurant and is quickly enticed into trying the (unkosher) escargot or snails. They then head straight to a cemetery (death again) in a car borrowed from Marcus’s roommate, in which Olivia services Marcus with an unexpected sexual favor that both shocks and pleasures him. He blabs about his experience to the roommate who loaned him the car, not realizing that this will provoke lender’s indignation, as it were, as well as trash talk that will lead to a physical altercation and to his seeking other lodging.

Marcus is uncertain whether to avoid or to pursue Olivia, even after learning that she had to leave Mt. Holyoke because of alcoholism, mental illness and attempted suicide. More than once he stalks her entering and leaving her dorm. It is she, after all, who, admiring his “Abraham Lincoln” origins, told him that he is not the “simple soul” intended as fodder for this type of college.

As it turns out, however, impressing Olivia is not Marcus’s major challenge.  Like all students, he is subject to periodic character review by Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts), who has learned that Marcus has left his “Jewish” habitat for a dinky, far-removed campus garret. Does the brilliant, on-scholarship Jewish fellow have problems with other Jews? The dean asks Marcus if he solves all problems by leaving, if “tolerance” itself is difficult for him. Why didn’t the promising student, sponsored by a “temple,” write “kosher” before “butcher” when asked on a questionnaire to fill in his dad’s line of work? Why didn’t he write “Jewish” on that form?

These questions incite a torrent of indignant responses from Marcus. He responds that he wasn’t trying to hide the religion into which he was born, but that he truly has “no religious preference.” He doesn’t need to practice one religion over another; he does not seek solace. He doesn’t need God or spiritual grounding (“spiritual sustenance” in the novel) because he “believes in the real.” He adds: “I’m capable of leading a moral life without beliefs that can’t be substantiated.”

The discussion between the freshman and the dean -- an unforgettable spectacle and exchange -- becomes a protracted high stakes duel of words. Regardless of the stakes the dean is concerned about Marcus and his place in the moral scheme of things. He even asks Marcus if he has dated.

One gets the impression that Marcus argues more from contrariness than deep conviction. In the film (unlike in the novel), his answers appear to well up mostly from resentment of the questions and of the interrogation itself. Also, since his first hour on campus (according to the film version), he has been caught up in mandatory chapel services during which school officials moralize. In the heat of his back-and-forth with Dean Caudwell he expresses his resentment of the chapel requirement, a “long-standing tradition” precious to the dean.

At one point Marcus offers a disclaimer: “I don’t object to Christ talk because I’m Jewish. I object because I’m an atheist.” Does Schamus hope to soften the dialogue for his Christian audience by adding this line to Roth? Or does he want to highlight Marcus’s own “missionary” zeal in challenging the dean to rethink his own Christianity because, after all, Bertrand Russell, who penned Why I Am Not A Christian, won the Nobel Prize?

Marcus’s sophomoric behavior in the dean’s office is standard college freshman fare, and the movie’s point is well taken that it should not be of life-and-death consequence. Yet Marcus takes sick there and literally survives a brush with death when he has emergency appendix surgery. Olivia visits him in the hospital and massages him under the sheets, much to the shock of the nurse who happens to enter. But Marcus and Olivia become confident that the nurse was too “embarrassed” to report them to the dean. Dignity can, after all, be exploited; some things decent people can be counted on not relate, or can they?

Emboldened by his newfound faith in dignity and embarrassment, Marcus sheds some of his indignation. He buddies up with Jewish fraternity chaps. They talk him into paying a surrogate to attend the relatively few required chapel services, as is their custom.  He is then free to pursue Olivia, and even starts to worry about her a bit. Out of concern and desire, he foolishly barges into the dean’s den of reproach after Olivia disappears. It is then that he commits the great sin of directing a four-letter word at the dean, who has told him that Olivia suffered a mental breakdown and is pregnant, and who mistakenly blames Marcus.

On one level, the movie is a sophomoric fantasy. Marcus has been pursued by a woman who, in the words of his mother, Esther (Linda Emond), “looks like a goddess.”  He believes that he is too good for his parents. His father has spiraled into pathological anxiety over the possible fate of his only son. And in one powerful scene his mother inflicts cruel emotional blackmail to “protect” him. The film is harder on the parents than the novel, perhaps to evoke a more “pure” fantasy.

But, like the novel, the film emphasizes that both parents were right. Marcus’s visiting mother spots Olivia’s slit wrist right away, and warns her “son...and only child” that “weak people are not harmless” and that he must find a woman -- and it can be any woman, for “this is 1951” -- who has not slit her wrists. His father had warned him from the beginning “the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.”

Sociologically and morally speaking, however, Marcus’s Jewish moorings, whether parental or otherwise, cannot save him, despite his father’s nudge, “What’s wrong with making some Jewish friends?” Jewish fraternity practices only get Marcus into more trouble than he finds on his own. This is not because he and the fraternity members are Jewish, but because the young men are of the age when indignity and indignation can be overwhelming.

If the suggestion is made that Puritanism and Christian mores can kill or can foster hypocrisy, then it is also suggested that this can happen only when Jews lack a moral compass for wise and graceful choices. If there is hypocrisy in this rigid college environment, it does not rest with the dean and the school. Avowed atheist Marcus did, after all, accept scholarship money from the synagogue (in the film, not in the novel) to attend a Christian-based school. The Jewish fraternity and Marcus are dishonest in their approach to chapel attendance.

Schamus does undermine the novel’s diatribes against religion by adding dialogue that could be used to question those diatribes. Is it moral to blame traditional morality and mores for cosmic unfairness and consequences of bad choices? Indeed, Schamus makes a point of coining a phrase for Marcus the Narrator, who can live very well with “bi-causality and choice.”

Does this film defy the novel by suggesting that in the absence of what Dean Caudwell calls spiritual “grounding” or “sustenance,” one must consider all the implications and ramifications of “bi-causality and choice,” which, in the end, can “inspire” only indignation, defiance and despair? And speaking of “bi-causality and choice,” this film about rejecting chapel attendance happens to be in theaters as a new survey indicates that reasons for decline in attendance at American religious services are as flimsy and lazy as a lot of American morals.