Three films based on a novel worth seeing: Leave No Trace, The Family Fang, and Indignation.
I. Leave No Trace (2018)
Adapted from Peter Rock‘s novel My Abandonment (2009), Leave No Trace “explores, with acute sensitivity and narrative finesse, how trauma molds a family’s life, threatens to spill over into the next generation, and might finally be withstood” (Inkoo Kang, Slate). The leads, Ben Foster (Will) and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie (Tom), play a father with PTSD and his teen daughter who are discovered living in a nature preserve.
Peter Debruge, Variety: “…Will and Tom are both interrogated by social workers. Our sympathy is with them, and yet, the authorities seem to have a point: Tom needs a chance to interact with other people, a fact McKenzie so effortlessly conveys via the wide-eyed curiosity Tom shows toward a world she has been taught to distrust, but which now holds considerable appeal for her — including not only boys, but the prospect of making friends her age.”
Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter: “The filmmaker has crafted an unusual coming-of-age tale, in which a teen declares independence from her parent gradually, gingerly, with tact and consideration rather than rebelliousness.”
II. The Family Fang (2015)
Kevin Wilson‘s novel The Family Fang was chosen a “Best Book” by Amazon. From their review, “For outré performance artists, Caleb and Camille Fang, everything in life is secondary to art, including their children. Annie and Buster (popularly known as Child A. and Child B.) are the unwilling stars of their parents’ chaotically subversive work. Art is truly a family affair for the Fangs. Years later, their lives in disarray, Annie and Buster reluctantly return home in search of sanctuary—only to be caught up in one last performance.”
The film’s parents are played by Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett; the adult kids, director Jason Bateman (Baxter) and Nicole Kidman (Annie).
David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter: “There’s an illuminating moment late in [the] film…when the unorthodox patriarch… says to his adult offspring, ‘You think we damaged you? So what! That’s what parents do.’ That’s close enough to a key to this smart, tart adaptation…which thumbs its nose at the cliches of the over-trafficked dysfunctional family genre to dissect the sometimes lifelong quest of children to understand their parents in ways that are funny and bittersweet, poignant and often bracingly dark.”
Rex Reed, New York Observer: “There’s nothing predictable about any of the angles, and [David Lindsay-] Abaire’s script reveals a surprise around every corner. The message is that if you’re in control, the chaos in life will happen around you, not to you. The performances are kinetic and fascinating.”
III. Indignation (2016)
Philip Roth‘s 2008 novel is the source for this film. David Edelstein‘s Vulture review title, “Indignation Is the Best Philip Roth Film Adaptation By a Mile,” is a sentiment echoed by other critics as well.
Rotten Tomatoes: “…Indignation takes place in 1951, as Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), a brilliant working class Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey, travels on scholarship to a small, conservative college in Ohio, thus exempting him from being drafted into the Korean War. But once there, Marcus’s growing infatuation with his beautiful classmate Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon), and his clashes with the college’s imposing Dean, Hawes Caudwell (Tracy Letts), put his and his family’s best laid plans to the ultimate test.”
Sexually inexperienced, Marcus is at first conflicted about his attraction to the more open and emotionally fragile Olivia. Stephen Holden, New York Times: “After a separation, they warily reconnect, and Olivia, who has scars on her wrist, confesses to Marcus that she had a breakdown and attempted suicide. In Ms. Gadon’s sensitive performance, you can feel the vulnerability just beneath the surface of her apparent poise. Marcus isn’t worldly enough to understand fully the implications of her instability. But when Esther visits and meets Olivia, she immediately notices and pleads with her son to discontinue the relationship.”
The movie’s 15-minute “grueling centerpiece,” according to Edelstein, is the one “in which Marcus is summoned to meet Dean Caudwell [Tracy Letts] and finds himself literally — and, folks, I’m not misusing that word — fighting to hold his insides together…Caudwell is the embodiment of right-wing, Christian authority and its penchant for hypocrisy (the charge against Marcus is a refusal to compromise), and Marcus’s attempts to assert religious and philosophical independence only tighten his own noose. Caudwell leaves Marcus in ruins while barely raising his voice.”
