Photo Gallery
This is not an easy character to like, for us or the other characters in the film. At the beginning of the film, Lurie, a literary snob who loves Byron and scoffs at Dickens, prods and seduces a student (Fiona Press) into a listless affair that leads to his termination and no small amount of public notoriety. Though it may seem like yet another in a long line of uninteresting chronicles of an elder professor falling for a young student, there's actually a racial/political subtext here: The incident reads more like a slight, crude metaphor for South Africa's shame.
Disgraced by this incident, David ends up at the farm where his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines) shepherds stray dogs and grows flowers and vegetables. He is immediately suspicious of Lucy's friend and co-worker Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), an older, friendly black man. Nevertheless, David seems at ease at the farm and, when he isn't in town helping at an animal hospital, he even finds himself willing to help Petrus with a few chores. Yet, he still pauses and wonders if Lucy and he should be worried when they spot three young black men teasing their dogs one day.
As it turns out, this time David's intuition is correct. In a scene Jacobs stages with a genuinely visceral rush, the three black men violently assault Lucy and David, raping her and severely burning him. David's suspicions come roaring back to full volume, but the real question seems to be if his discrimination (and by extension his country's) has ever really been quelled. The attack sparks an argument between father and daughter: He insists they call the police while she refers to the three young men as 'debt collectors.'
Like Atom Egoyan's Adoration, Disgrace is a film about human crimes and the footprints of racism. All these acts become grounds for a somewhat obvious argument on what is owed or, more abstractly, if anything is owed in the face of such unfathomable historical crimes. The rape leaves Lucy pregnant. Returning from an excursion back to his house in Cape Town, David deems the unborn baby an abomination. Nevertheless, Lucy opts to keep the child.
The argument continues, but the film begins to meander as it strives to balance outrage and guilt. The talks between David and Lucy begin to resemble an ideological dispute rather than familial discourse. Monticelli's script and Malkovich's odd and entertaining performance leave David on morally ambiguous ground, but to Lucy, he is just another white man attempting to move on with his life without fully grasping what his country has been through. Luckily, the film doesn't dare to suggest any concise answer to these problems. Jacobs understands that searching for any solution to the wounds left open in South Africa is about as logical as trying to look at the back of your own head.
