DISGRACE
by Chris Knipp

J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace is a hard, concentrated novel, painful to read, unyielding, uncooperative, unfun. What better actor than John Malkovich to convey Coetzee's unwillingness to do anything to ingratiate himself to the reader? The actor projects a cold self-assurance. It may not even matter that in Steve Jacobs' Disgrace, Malkovich's South African accent is faulty at best, fades in and out; that he seems too distant and affected to be any kind of literature teacher, let alone one currently teaching Wordsworth, a devotee of Byron. The same thing happened with his performance as Valmont in Frears' Dangerous Liaisons. His Midwestern drawl grated; he lacked suavity, lacked charm. None of it mattered because he had such evil, such confidence, such panache, such an edge, he held the screen and transformed himself into a new compelling kind of 18th-century French Iago of love. Besides, here, as his daughter Lucy, the South African newcomer Jessica Haines is equally important and very good, less flawed by casting incongruities than Malkovich. And as Coetzee has acknowledged, the most important thing about the adaptation is how the film can convey the beauty of the South African landscape better than his book did.

What's most disturbing to people about the novel is this: it conveys ideas through the protagonist David Lurie (Malkovich's role) about how South Africa has been trashed, how the blacks hate the whites, how the country is a place of anarchy and violence, that are clearly Coetzee's own views. How dare he do that and make no bones about it? But since he's ruthlessly honest, how dare he not? The novel was the first I read by Coetzee and didn't make me run out to read more. But the book became the first time a writer won a Booker Prize twice, and four years later Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Maybe he was doing something right.

And so were the Australian director Jacobs, and his Moroccan-born wife Anna Maria Monticelli, who wrote the screenplay and produced film. Outsiders that they are, they have nonetheless produced an adaptation that makes a complex book clearer without mangling or oversimplifying it. This kind of international production may grate upon the spirits of South Africans, but they wouldn't be likely to enjoy an all-local production either. All one can say is that this is a book that works well as a film and that adapts successfully without a lot of changes.

Lurie (Malkovich) has had several wives but he "wasn't made for marriage." A womanizer, a sensualist, at 52 he's losing his physical attraction; he's looking old. Even his Malay prostitute lets him go. He forces himself upon Melanie Isaacs (Antoinette Engel), a mixed-race student in his romantic poetry class. When they have sex, she turns away as if repelled, but she submits. He's found out and threatened by Melanie's boyfriend, yelled at by her father, boycotted by the students, and at an administrative hearing he's so unrepentent he ends up being forced to leave the college. He goes to the Eastern Cape where his lesbian daughter Lucy has recently been abandoned by her lover. She grows flowers and vegetables she sells in the local market, and she arranges for David to help Bev (Fiona Press), a middle-aged lady whose animal shelter work consists primarily of euthanizing unwanted dogs. In and out of the property he now shares with Lucy is Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), an almost mythically neutral, philosophical black man who owns land there and is gradually taking over, but who also made Lucy's garden land arable. Then an outside horror invades their lives.

The film, like the book (but perhaps in clearer outline) is about humiliation, suffering, enduring. It's about sexuality and about living with other beings, other animals. Viewers who don't find Disgrace "real" astonish me, though people and events are symbolic as well as specific, always richly both, and always simple and complex. David sleeps with Bev to please her, because she's lonely, and she wants it. Of course it's the sort of good deed that pleases him, but there is humility in it, as is his help, however unenthusiastic, with the animals. Malkovich's arrogance becomes complex because the most vivid images in the film are the ones of him cowering and afraid. In order to maintain his Byronic arrogance as a genteel rapist of "coloured" young women, he has given up his pride and his status. Disgrace is a film for smart people. It's as tightly coiled and thought-provoking as the book, and nearly as good.

©2009 Chris Knipp
CineScene