arts & life

f i lm

My
Generation

Naomi Pfefferman | Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.

Logan Lerman

hits his stride

in the film

adaptation of a

Philip Roth novel.

A

Logan Lerman

“I’m proud to be
Jewish,” Lerman
says. “I love the
traditions and the
culture that have
been passed down
from generation to
generation.”

68 August 11 • 2016

t 24, Logan Lerman
has revealed him-
self to be one of the
most promising actors of his
generation. Best known for
his turns as Poseidon’s son
in the Percy Jackson films
and as an awkward teenager
in 2012’s The Perks of Being
a Wallflower, Lerman is
about to make an even big-
ger splash in a very different
kind of coming-of-age story:
James Schamus’ Indignation
(see “Indignation” on page
70) based on the 2008 Philip
Roth novel about a Jewish
atheist chafing against reli-
gious and sexual mores at
his conservative college in
Ohio during the Korean War.
Lerman signed on to
the film late last year after
taking some time off from
acting. He had felt drained
after completing the gruel-
ing shoot for 2014’s Fury,
in which he played an
American soldier fighting
the Nazis during the final
days of World War II.
“It was an exhausting
project,” Lerman said in a
telephone interview from
his home in Los Angeles. “I
needed to find some new
inspiration.”
The actor discovered

that spark when his rep-
resentatives sent him the
Indignation script about
eight months ago.
“I read it right away, and I
just had a visceral reaction,”
he said. He immediately
hoped to portray the main
character, Marcus Messner, a
college freshman who even-
tually becomes undone by
the repressive doctrines of
the early 1950s.
Lerman was especially
riveted by a 15-minute
scene between Marcus
and his iron-fisted college
dean, which devolves into a
virulent philosophical and
theological debate with anti-
Semitic undertones.
The dean, played in the
film by Tracy Letts, wants
to know why Marcus did
not indicate on his college
application that his father
was a kosher butcher. He
further asks why the fresh-
man didn’t describe himself
as Jewish on his admissions
form. (That didn’t prevent
the school from assigning
him to room with two of the
few other Jews on campus,
however.)
Marcus tartly replies that
he doesn’t practice any one
religion over another, that
he eschews believing in
God and that “prayer to me
is preposterous.” He fur-
ther objects to the school’s
mandatory attendance at
Christian chapel services
and declares his affinity for
Bertrand Russell’s controver-
sial essay “Why I Am Not a
Christian.”
“Tolerance appears to be
something of a problem for
you,” the dean retorts at one
point in the conversation.

At the end of the rancor-
ous conversation, Marcus
erupts with indignation —
figuratively and, also, almost
literally — as he collapses
on the office floor with
what turns out to be a burst
appendix.
“It’s the most important
scene in the movie,” Lerman
said. “These characters are
just at war. It’s two conflict-
ing world views; a battle of
the minds.”
And the stakes are poten-
tially those of life and death.
Should Marcus be expelled,
he would be sent to fight in
the Korean War, which had
already claimed the lives of
a number of young Jewish
men back home in his native
Newark, N.J.
The day after Lerman
finished reading the script,
he met with Schamus and
soon landed the job. Reading
Indignation “was that rare
moment when you go, ‘This
is it,’” he said. “But maybe 15
minutes later my heart was
just flooded with stress and
anxiety — knowing I was
going to have to memorize,
understand and fully realize
the material.”
Copious research on the
time period helped the
young actor. Lerman studied
Roth’s novel, memorized
the Russell essay, perused
books on the 1950s and
even worked for a time in a
kosher butcher shop to pre-
pare for Marcus’ scenes in
his father’s meat store.
The actor came to perceive
his character not as arro-
gant, but as “an independent
thinker and opinionated
young man with extreme
world views that he has to