Disgrace

Directed by Steve Jacobs

(Not Rated)

***

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A white professor in South Africa has an affair with a student.

Disgrace is a “faithful, compelling adaptation” of J.M. Coetzee’s brilliant 1999 novel, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. John Malkovich puts on a “magnetic” performance as a haughty professor in post-apartheid South Africa who seduces one of his mixed-race students. Unapologetic when forced to resign, he moves to the countryside, only to be left physically and emotionally broken by an assault. Like the book, Disgrace is a “hard-headed allegorical meditation on the bestial side of human nature and its reflection in a poisoned social climate.” At least, that’s what it aspires to be, said Aaron Hillis in Time Out New York. Though technically a faithful adaptation, the film can’t do Coetzee’s complex tale of justice. The novel is simply “too much book for two hours of celluloid.” Director Steve Jacobs “captures the spareness of Coetzee’s prose without conveying its forcefulness,” said Keith Phipps in The Onion. The film takes on the book’s heavy themes of race, power, and even animal rights, yet never fully examines them. “It’s admirably true to a source that eludes it.”