Barely half an hour has passed in “Star Trek Beyond,” and the USS Enterprise is already getting a haircut. First of all, its main thrusters are sheared off, which must—though I’m no expert—spell trouble for the warp drive, and then the tubular body drops away, leaving only the central saucer. In short, everybody’s favorite spacecraft has just turned into one big galactic Frisbee. There’s a wonderful shot of Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), safe in his ejection pod, gazing through the windshield at the flaming corpse of his beloved ship, which plunges down toward the crags of an unwelcoming planet. Even agnostics, unmoved by the remorseless reboots of the “Star Trek” franchise, may find themselves mourning the loss.
On the other hand, it does give Kirk a dose of pep and purpose. At the start of the film, on his nine hundred and sixty-sixth day in deep space, he quietly confesses that “things have started to feel episodic.” We’re with you, Jim, especially those of us who are now sitting down to our thirteenth “Star Trek” movie. Kirk is mulling over a promotion, to a grander but flightless role, while Spock (Zachary Quinto) has career plans of his own, possibly connected to the cooling of his relationship with Lieutenant Uhura (Zoë Saldana). That she might ever tire of making out with a Vulcan sounds illogical, but the heart has its reasons, even in zero gravity. To be honest, the whole darn crew seems frayed, so it’s something of a blessing—or, at any rate, a bonding exercise—when the Enterprise, traversing a distant nebula to rescue a stranded vessel, is peppered and pulled apart. Earlier, Kirk had described the mission as “straightforward,” but then, though indubitably the bravest of commanders, he was never really the brightest. Even now, a trace of the eager rube still clings to him, and his idea of a helpful stunt, at a critical point in the film, is to mount an old motorcycle, light-years from Earth, and gun it straight at the enemy.
The villain of the piece is Krall (Idris Elba), who, like the majority of life-forms in the “Star Trek” universe, just happens to be a biped of roughly human stature, with a good working grasp of colloquial English. There is no reason that a major character couldn’t be shaped like a lamprey, visible only in infrared, or a cloud of noble gas, but I suppose casting agents might object. Krall is one of those acquisitive fellows, like Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings,” whose happiness will not be complete until he gets his mitts on a particular doodad. In Krall’s case, it is the Abronath, which is not a Scottish fishing town but the key, as so often, to ultimate power. What I like most about Krall is his squadron of attack ships—spiky little critters that swarm through the interstellar vacuum like starlings, cavorting and swaying this way and that.
Such is the surprise that is sprung by the latest film: it’s not just a blast but, at moments, a thing of beauty, alive to the comic awesomeness of being lost in space. Did Kirk ever dream that he would slide down the outside of the Enterprise as it keels over, firing his phaser upward at the bridge? He is dwarfed by the immensity of his craft, which itself is reduced to a mere sliver, near the beginning of the film, when it docks at Yorkville—a planet-size base that hangs in the heavens like a Christmas bauble, with inverted boulevards and skyscrapers curving around inside.
Written by Doug Jung and Simon Pegg, who stars once more as Scotty, and directed by Justin Lin, “Star Trek Beyond” refuses to be sidetracked by solemnity—the besetting sin of some previous installments. Apart from a few brief lectures on the relative merits of unity (good) and conflict (bad), the story skirts past lulls and doldrums, unveils a sprightly new heroine named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), and lays out the set pieces, in Kirk’s words, “the old-fashioned way.” The best of these arrives when Kirk and his team engage Krall’s fleet not with quantum torpedoes but with a cranked-up blast of the Beastie Boys. So it’s official: in space, everyone can hear you scream.
When did you last see a film with a lengthy conversation at its heart? There is Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre” (1981) and, before that, Éric Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s” (1969), in which a man stays over with a beautiful woman; being French, they spend so long discussing love, desire, and Catholic philosophy that, despite being French, they never get around to having sex. Then, there is Christoph Waltz, as the smiling Nazi of “Inglorious Basterds” (2009), and the leisurely chats that he enjoys—one in a café, in front of a strudel with whipped cream, and another at a kitchen table. In truth, they are more like soliloquies, and, because this is a Quentin Tarantino movie, the talk is booby-trapped; you sense that violent action is primed to explode. But what if there were no action—or, rather, if talk were action, with the words bursting like shells in our ears?
That is the case with James Schamus’s “Indignation,” and, in particular, with one volatile exchange. It occurs at Winesburg College, in Ohio, between a freshman named Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman) and Hawes Caudwell (Tracy Letts), a domineering figure in a solid blue suit, who, as dean of the college, must be amply acquainted with every strain of turpitude among his charges. But what is the problem with Marcus? Bright, industrious, and undebauched, he seems a model student—a working-class Jewish kid from New Jersey, who came to Winesburg on a scholarship. Something about him, however, needles the dean. Marcus has failed to join a Jewish fraternity, and now, abraded by his roommates, he has moved to another dormitory, and to a room of his own. What Caudwell wonders is: How can you hope to get on in life if you don’t get on with folks? And so the back-and-forth begins to swell. Minor differences of opinion turn into perspiring rants from Marcus and counterattacks, laced with condescension, from the dean. His efforts to defuse the mood with praise—“You are destined to be an outstanding lawyer”—serve only to heighten Marcus’s resentment. Part duel, part duet, the scene lasts sixteen minutes and concludes not with a resolving chord but in a spasm of bile.
The story springs, of course, from a book by Philip Roth. He is the laureate of bridling, and “Indignation,” published in 2008, is as much a study in mulishness as “Portnoy’s Complaint,” from 1969. Roth’s landscape is pitted and rutted where people have dug in their hooves and refused to budge, whatever the cost may be; and in “Indignation” the cost could scarcely be more severe. The time is 1951, and one reason that Marcus’s mother, Esther (Linda Emond), and his father, a butcher named Max (Danny Burstein), are not just proud of their son but relieved by his academic prowess is that most of his pals, deprived of his opportunities, have been drafted to serve in Korea. To put the matter starkly: if you don’t study, you could die, and we see Marcus, before he sets off for Winesburg, attending the funeral of a friend.
This air of momentousness pervades every deed in Schamus’s film. Take Marcus’s first date with Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon)—fair, immaculate, and, at first blush, unapproachable. They have dinner at a fancy French place, after which, in the front seat of a car, she does all the approaching that Marcus could ever wish for. But note their surroundings: the car is parked by a cemetery, and the hero’s innocence is lost among the dead. Also, Olivia herself has been in the wars. At another college, before Winesburg, she tried to kill herself, and bears a scar to prove it. The finest moment of the film comes when Esther Messner travels to Winesburg to see her son, who has just had an emergency appendectomy. In the hospital, she meets Olivia (who has aided the patient’s recovery, with a Rothian flourish, by jerking him off under the bedclothes), and the two women swap pleasantries. In one short closeup, however, we see Olivia’s scar, and we see that Esther has seen it, too. Later, she cautions Marcus against having anything to do with a girl who has slit her wrists. It was only one wrist, he protests. “One is enough,” she says. The words are delivered as if being graven in stone.
Linda Emond is magnificent in the scene, leonine in her protectiveness yet remaining perfectly calm. Together with Tracy Letts, who brings to Caudwell both a dash of amusement and a will of iron, Emond presents “Indignation” with a snag: the senior actors are tougher than their juniors. Logan Lerman is endearing, finding shyness as well as bluster in the hero (when discomposed, he turns aside and narrows his eyes, like Richard Gere), and Sarah Gadon has the look of an injured angel, but the movie simply asks too much of them. Also, some of their chatter—not filtered through Marcus’s narration, as it is on the page, but delivered straight—has a half-archaic stiffness (“I, who have eight thousand moods a minute,” Olivia says), and that lack of pliability extends to the entire tale. Schamus is a great producer of independent cinema, having overseen—and sometimes co-written—the work of Ang Lee, but this is the first movie he has directed, and the rhythm of the storytelling feels careful and courteous to a fault. Yet Marcus’s plight is genuinely grave, and Schamus sets up delicate visual rhymes that are not in Roth: the roses on Olivia’s print skirt, for instance, match the ones that she takes to the hospital, and the wallpaper that we see at the beginning and at the end of the film. In memory, such flowers never lose their bloom; in Ohio or Korea, though, young lives wilt, fade, and get thrown away. ♦