http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6932
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Based closely on the outstanding 1999 novel that won J.M. Coetzee the Nobel Prize in Literature, the new art house film Disgrace follows August’s District 9 in portraying the ever-growing http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2479 in Disgrace is too starkly horrifying for even journalists to ignore.
Disgrace won’t come within an order of magnitude of District 9’s $114 million at the U.S. box office. It is the despairing antithesis of Taken, the surprise 2009 hit ($145 million) in which mighty Liam Neeson lays waste to half of Paris to rescue his virgin daughter from Muslim pimps. In Disgrace, however, effete John Malkovich (best known for, well, Being John Malkovich) portrays an ineffectual intellectual who fails to save his daughter from being gang-raped by newly liberated blacks.
I’ve read only one other Coetzee novel, 1980’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a conventional anti-apartheid allegory about the moral costs of imperialism. In Disgrace, however, the barbarians have finally arrived, and with a vengeance. I can only vaguely guess how Coetzee’s career has managed to survive over the decade since publication of Disgrace. He remains a favorite of English professors who discourse on topics like “J.M. Coetzee and the Postcolonial Rhetoric of Simultaneity,” even while he radiates contempt for them, such as in this hilariously curt interview. Although the ruling African National Congress has denounced Disgrace as racist, many white literary and film critics have managed to convince themselves that all the really smart people understand that the book must actually be about something other than what it seems to be about. (This is particularly ironic because the concept of rape as an act of political power, the essence of the plot, is a staple of academic feminism.)
Malkovich plays David Lurie, an aging Cape Town Casanova, who, in the usual academic sexual harassment brouhaha familiar from David Mamet’s Oleanna, gets fired from his job trying to explain Lord Byron’s poetry to college students majoring in Communications Studies.
The funny-looking Malkovich, whose affected delivery makes him sound like Liberace’s evil twin brother, has been frequently cast as a Lothario (for example, in Dangerous Liaisons) for reasons I can’t explain. But then, even though I’ve followed his career since his Steppenwolf days in Chicago theatre, I’m not sure why he’s a movie star at all. Force of will, I guess. Daniel Day-Lewis would have been more natural as Dr. Lurie, the olive-skinned Byronic seducer turned creepy middle-aged man. Or, if they had wanted a leading man who rather looks like Coetzee to play the presumably semi-autobiographical role, Jeremy Irons would have fit the bill. Still, Malkovich glowers and whispers his way through well enough.
http://www.takimag.com/article/heart_of_darkness/