Squint your eyes as you watch Indignation and you might discern a certain tragic archetype beneath the surface of Sarah Gadon's character. “James thought that Philip Roth was really influenced by Sylvia Plath when he wrote Olivia Hutton,” she tells the Straight, referring to writer-director James Schamus’s take on Roth’s 2008 novel, now adapted for the screen. “He wanted me to write like Sylvia Plath so when you see me writing the letter to Marcus, I’m actually using her handwriting. I traced a lot of her letters for a long time.”

That’s not all that the 29-year-old Torontonian and her co-star Logan Lerman were required to do in preparation for the acclaimed period film, now playing, about the dangerous affair between a Jewish student from Newark and the deeply troubled Wasp played by Gadon. Noting Schamus’s absence of “first-time director energy”, and the fact that he ran Focus Features and penned numerous Oscar-nominated films over the course of a long career, Gadon adds: “He’s also a professor, so working with him was kind of like taking a course. He gave us a syllabus, he gave us reading material, he gave us things to watch, he gave us music to listen to, he gave us assignments…” Including, she reveals, packing his two leads off to the theatre to watch Annie Baker’s notoriously long off-Broadway hit, The Flick.  

“I felt like that was for us to have this exercise in patience and in adhering to the written word,” Gadon explains. “There’s so many things! I mean, he’s James, he’s always thinking about things to do and I think it shows because there’s so much detail in the film.” Indeed, the stately drama somehow manages to pack an enormous amount of significance into a seemingly understated whole, with the suffocating environment of a fictional Ohio college in the early ‘50s as its all-purpose metaphor for prejudices we’re still grappling with today. Not least among them is the treatment Hutton receives for her promiscuity, made that much more threatening by her soaring intelligence. Behind all that is a form of heavy emotional damage only alluded to by the film, and about which Gadon, predictably, remains just as circumspect. 

“For a woman like Olivia, everything that is left unsaid is so fraught,” she says. “Really I think it’s more interesting when nothing is said about it, and that tension just accumulates underneath the surface.” What this leaves is a possibly too-conventional dramatic trope in which a barely post-adolescent boy is drawn into l’amour fou. But Gadon—a veteran of three David Cronenberg movies and the star, along with Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman, of Xavier Dolan’s next—has a much better angle on that. “It’s interesting to me because Marcus for Olivia is just as much the forbidden fantasy,” she says. “When she gives him the hand job in the hospital, everyone is, like, ‘Oh, classic Philip Roth,’ but nobody talks about how she sits down afterwards and she says, ‘Tell me what it’s like to be a Jew; tell me what it’s like to work in a butcher shop.' There’s just as much voyeurism in it for her.”

Georgia Straight, September 2016