Disgrace [Blu-ray]

Director: Steve Jacobs Steve Jacobs

Overview

John Malkovich stars in director Steve Jacobs' adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel concerning a Cape Town educator whose flight from scandal leads him into a direct confrontation with the lingering demons of apartheid. Fastidious Cape Town college professor David Lurie (Malkovich) may see himself as somewhat impervious, but he's about to bring about his own downfall due to a selfish and foolhardy relationship with a student who isn't afraid to drag their clandestine affair screaming into the light. When controversy erupts on campus as a result of the affair, David beats a hasty retreat to the countryside in order to lie low on his daughter Lucy's (Jessica Haines) remote farm in the Eastern Cape. However, David's fears for his daughter's isolation are soon confirmed when father and daughter are violently attacked by three black youths. In the aftermath of the horrific siege, David is deeply shaken to learn that one of their assailants is in fact a relative of trusted worker Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), who lives peacefully alongside Lucy in the South African brush, and has even begun constructing a home at the edge of her property. Can these people somehow find grace in a country that's still struggling with its tragic history, or is that history destined to repeat itself forever into the future?

Product Details

Release Date:	03/21/2010
UPC:	0014381648553
Original Release:	2008
Rating:	R
Source:	RLJ ENTERTAINMENT, INC
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Language:	English
Time:	1:58:00
Sales rank:	34,560

Special Features

Interviews with Cast and Crew; "Making Of" Featurette; Trailer

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

John Malkovich	Professor David Lurie
Fiona Press	Bev Shaw
Antoinette Engel	Melanie Isaacs
David Dennis	Mr. Isaacs
Jessica Haines	Lucy
Charles Tertiens	Ryan
Paula Arundell	Dr. Farodia Rassool
Natalie Becker	Soraya
Antonio Fisher	Sidney
Cindy Mkaza	Mrs. Mbeti
David Denis	Mr. Isaacs
Anne Looby	Rosalind
David Ritchie	Manas Mathbane
Monroe Reimers	Hakim
Sara Zwangobani	Junge Frau
Barry Quin	Desmond Swarts
Michael Richard	Bill Shaw
Denise Newman	Mrs. Isaacs
Eve Szapira	Mrs. Cundell
Terence Bridgett	Sidney
Scott Cooper	Actor
Eriq Ebouaney	Actor
Anthony Partos	Composer,Composer
Graeme Koehne	Composer

Technical Credits

Anna Maria Monticelli

Steve Jacobs	Director,Producer
Anna Maria Monticelli	Screenwriter,Producer
Emile Sherman	Producer
Wouter Barendrecht	Executive Producer
Michael J. Werner	Executive Producer
Julio DePietro	Executive Producer
Ann Fay	Casting
Moonyeenn Lee	Casting
Sam Petty	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

When film professors and Ph.D. students engage in dry discourse about film adaptations, they often choose to ignore the most basic and most substantial aspect of having multiple versions of a text. A film based on a book provides (re)viewers with a built-in "anchor," or point of comparison, which will inherently dictate the flow of discussion like an analytic magnet. The strengths of "high" literature, which are notoriously unreproducible in cinema, thus become weaknesses of the film, often before the lights of the theater have even dimmed. With this in mind, director/producer Steve Jacobs and writer/producer Anna Maria Monticelli deserve applause for even attempting to adapt J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace for the screen, and their ambition makes the project a success, even if the final product is discernibly flawed. Few novels of the latter half of the 20th century garnered more critical praise than 1999's Disgrace, which brought Coetzee an unprecedented second Booker Prize and propelled him to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. The novel, which charts the fall of a white South African professor after his forced affair with a mixed-race female student becomes public, has a strong narrative drive, but, like all great literature, Disgrace is primarily a meditation on the inability of language to express what is most essential about our existence and a celebration of the author's determination to keep writing anyway. That same spirit is captured by this moving film, as Jacobs and Monticelli subtly and successfully heighten the tension built by the plot by examining the frayed relations within a society where surface disparities easily overwhelm more fundamental similarities. Questions of race, class, family, and religion are so indelibly interrelated that the characters inevitably find the hierarchy of their loyalties to these social markers becoming condensed and constricted, until they fluctuate under observation, like the particles of quantum physics. John Malkovich provides his usual standout performance as David Lurie, a professor of Romantic literature, who self-justifies his immoral actions with antiquated notions of the righteous nature of individual passion and desire, gleaned from the poetry of Lord Byron. On the surface, Lurie's philosophy is brightly tinted with hints of benevolence, in that it makes every experience into an opportunity to learn to live better, but the darkness beneath the optimistic glitter is soon exposed when he and his daughter are viciously attacked, thus becoming the objects of another's violent desire. As the characters begin to react in surprising ways to this seminal event, the audience senses the gaps where, in the book, Coetzee's superlative introspective prose adeptly nurses the reader through the complexities of their shifting moralities. While it would be indefensible to advise that someone see this movie in lieu of reading the novel, anyone who has either already read the book or has no plans to read it has much to gain from this compelling film.