Review of “Disgrace”
Over the last twenty years, film adaptations of Booker prize winning novels have been few and far between, and rarely a success (The English Patient is the great exception). It’s been ten years since J.M. Coetzee wrote his masterpiece Disgrace – voted the greatest novel of the last 25 years by a collection of English luminaries in 2006 - and the world’s greatest filmmakers never rushed to bring it to the screen. It’s the complex, subtle and sometimes disturbing story of David Lurie, a bored, divorced, middle-aged academic who is shamed after an affair with a student at his South African university. Remorseless, Lurie decides on a self-imposed exile on a remote farm managed by his daughter, Lucy. Here he witnesses the violence of social change, as black farmers begin to control the land and exercise their power. All the fundamental values on which this flawed man has come to rely are being swept away. Whilst Lucy compromises and accepts her fate in this new world - and with it some sense of dignity - Lurie sees little hope.
With a core of clearly dramatic events (sex and violence) and the cinematic sweep of the countryside of the Eastern Cape, you can see the temptation to make the book a film, and it came as a surprise to many (though perhaps not to the more canny producer) that the rights fell to Australian husband and wife team Anna-Marie Monticelli (who adapted the film for the screen) and Steve Jacobs (who directs). They’ve made only one film before: the very lightweight melodrama La Spagnola.
Does it work? In parts, yes. John Malkovich – who has made a living out of being enigmatically creepy - is a producer’s casting coup in the lead role. Yet we know, before the film starts - that his David Lurie will be almost impossible to like, such is his performance style. Monticelli & Jacob’s solution to the dilemma of an unsympathetic lead character with an inconclusive story arc is to draw a much stronger – and rather too obvious - connection between the plight of David & Lucy and the state of the post-apartheid South Africa. Increasingly, neighbouring black farmer Petrus (Eriq Ebuaney) becomes a symbolic figure, and more so the farmhouse he is building. The far trickier and far more interesting inner journey of Lurie – and his relationship with the future – is sacrificed for a more digestible and romanticised story about nation. Only Jessica Haines – in a superb performance as the troubled and brave Lucy – maintains a sense of subtlety. Jacobs’ less than delicate direction is M-rated and safe, and ultimately he protects us from the raw dread that we should experience through Lurie if we are to truly understand the core theme of the story: that the loss of grace means there is no salvation.
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