Co-producer Anna-Maria Monticelli’s screen adaptation of Disgrace sticks close to the lauded John M. Coetzee novel and is directed by her husband, Steve Jacobs. Significantly, the Australians shot on location in South Africa, the rich Westernized nation whose post-Apartheid lawlessness has come close to making a ghost town of downtown Johannesburg.

Although the opening setting is Cape Town, there’s no indication of its physical magnificence, and the bulk of the action occurs in Eastern Cape Karroo, where green hills loom over towns, markets, and dirt roads that end at remote homes.

The famously impressive landscape is impassive, dwarfing human activity played out in a society racked by disparities in wealth, racial and ethnic tensions, and the violence pictured by countrywoman and also Nobel- and Booker Prize-writer Nadine Gordimer, sudden, casual, unreasoned. Beneath the overcivilized arrogant literary listlessness of John Malkovich’s publically disgraced David Lurie, lies the inchoate abyss of his own egoistic life, a reflection of the dark inside of South African society, divided against itself and rudderless.

Individual or societal in thrust, the film is hampered by a lack of resolution and the impenetrability of motivations. Instead, for example, of concluding with Lurie’s repentance (a contrast to his faculty-hearing lip service) to the parents of a woman he has wronged, it undercuts his contrition by his attendance at her student play.

Much of the problem lies with the omnipresent lead. Malkovich’s habitual prissy surface betrays no depth of flaw or frailty or perfectibility. His divorced mid-fiftyish Romantic poetry scholar specializes in scandalous roué Lord Byron, has had a share of short- and long-term lovers, hires black prostitutes, and forces his attentions on university theater arts undergraduate Melanie Isaacs (Antoinette Engel). His lovemaking is, like the personality, pro forma, but he continues in pursuit of the reluctant student and winds up “asked” to resign after he advances nothing in his own defense.

Packing a banjo and a black morocco Byron for an opera to be written, he drives unannounced to the isolated farm where Lucy lives, grows flowers and plants for sale at market, keeps mastiffs for company and protection, and, in return for free range and housing in an outbuilding while he constructs his own breezeblock dwelling, has odd jobs done by local Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney).

SPOILER ALERT

Three shy young blacks appear, asking a favor. Seizing the unguarded moment, they shoot the caged dogs, throw mentholated spirits and a match on David, and lock themselves inside with Lucy, who afterwards brings her father to a clinic but, traumatized, refuses to talk about what happened or press the matter with law enforcement.

David had begun to help out at a volunteer animal shelter, whose director, Bev Shaw (Fiona Press), unwillingly puts down unadopted strays. Her husband Bill disappears from sight, leaving David to seduce her as well; but like everything else this goes nowhere.

All is viewed as if through David, even-keel in lovemaking as in apologizing or urging Lucy to go to her mother’s in Holland. Thus the film cannot say what it needs to say. It’s not even clear whether he loses his teaching post for moral turpitude or for crossing some racial lines, or what. Neither father David nor daughter Lucy open to each other or, fatally for Disgrace, to the viewer.

(Released by Paladin; not rated by MPAA.)