"No country, this, for old men." Thoughts on Disgrace
“…A mad old man who sits among the dogs and sings to himself!”
That mad old man is David Lurie (John Malkovich) a professor of the Romantics in Cape Town, South Africa. He’s at the center of Steve Jacobs’ film Disgrace, based on the best selling and award winning (and one of my five favorite books) J.M. Coetzee novel. How he becomes mad is only the surface of this story – this isn’t a film about good deeds or bad deeds, or about redemption and rebirth; no, this is a film that asks hard questions that don’t have answers, a film that observes with the objectivity and coldness of fact. It’s also one of the best films of the year, and is filled with deep moments of power, poignancy, and truth; it will leave anyone who watches it in a state of heated conversation about the morally ambiguous dilemmas that plague the film’s characters.
