Review of Disgrace (2008) by Tom B — 08 Jun 2010

J.M. Coetzee is the mind behind this strong story. There is a reason he won the Booker twice, among others. In reading the book I had a sense of Lurie being a fair stand-in for Coetzee. One of the great pleasures of the film is seeing Malkovich bring extraordinary presence to the sense of this.

We are a seeing a mind struggle with itself and the world he is in with great deliberation and learning, and coming up with startling recognitions and certainties. There is a sense of the film offering us a more soothing resolution than the novel, but this is a requirement, at times, of film.

Yet it is unsettling in just the ways I remember the book. What helped me enjoy the film was seeing the story physicalized for me in certain details and thus gaining a greater understanding of the people in the story.

How fair this was to Coetzee's vision I don't know, but I do know he approved script and all changes. The story neatly observes extremes of correctness that overwhelm the thinking world, simple summations that men are bad, and most of all white men.

Malkovich delivers poetry to his class in a scene that is among the most demonic I've seen, and he brings a genuine sense of the Devil to his smile. Yet he is a "mad heart", not really a villain, not anymore than Petrus or the men who rape his daughter.

His daughter in a way that is difficult to fathom, but logical in its own way, takes the correctness into the heart of the country and stands her ground. We go from a tribunal asking penance of the professor, to the tribunal of life outside the safe confines of the academy, and there the judgement is not interested in penitence, but rather exacts a different toll.

Like any good or great story, the certainty of the truth is not fully comforting. We can say "they" or "he" is wrong, or "she". All the decisions, so human, seem insane depending which point of view one takes.

All serve to raise issues and questions of shame, the balance of power between those who were shamed, and he shame now, and the weight of disgrace, especially when one is disgraced before the eyes of all human civilization.

Malkovich's professor may take comfort that in the country nobody cares what sin of trespass he may have committed in the city, but the price he pays is exposure to forces that dwarf his unchecked satanic impulses with the same implacability as a tidal wave may show while drowning us.

Not a cinema piece, rather a novel distilled to cinematic transmission, but a performance to be seen, and a story to grasp and feel.