David Lurie (John Malkovich) is a white South African who teaches English at a university there until he pleads guilty to abusing his authority in a sexual relationship with a student, and is dismissed by the faculty tribunal. He's supercilious and willful, domineering and highly intelligent, but his careless treatment of others obviously lends itself to his downfall. Sexual predatory behavior and pride seem to go hand-in-hand for Lurie, but the racial tension of the formerly apartheid country also catches up with him.

After Lurie flees to the countryside to live with his daughter, you're lulled into thinking that he's bound for some natural healing. His English mind (and love of Byron) plays out against a backdrop where he observes situations like the one at the local veterinarian facility, with animals who are put down because nobody wants them. The film's violence is sudden like a Denis Lehane novel, but the dialogue throughout, paralleling the human "relationships" Lurie has abused to the way that animals act ("the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature,") revolves around Lurie's own nature and his inability to change.

Lucy (Jessica Haines) plays Lurie's daughter, and when she is raped and her father set on fire, their lives take on a different level of complete frustration and helplessness. All of Lurie's problems up until this moment have been self-inflicted but now he's actually the subject of someone else's poor decisions. In the aftermath of the attack, Lucy is the one who takes on the leadership role, and Lurie himself seems completely paralyzed. Most of the brutality is off screen, but it's completely jarring for both the characters and the audience. The calm, the sense of stillness, has been violently ripped apart.

Lurie's understanding of South Africa revolves around white gentlemanly types being "good," and black Africans or mixed racial Africans being "lesser" (if not "bad.") As he deals with the pain of his daughter's rape, and the fact that the attackers are not bad because they are black but bad because they aggressively act out their own desires on people who can't fight back. Good versus evil, want versus need, and right versus wrong all play out in drastic tension within the mind and life of this ex-professor. It's agonizingly painful to watch someone so smart make such dumb decisions, and yet, it shows that intelligence has nothing to do with recognizing fault, or accepting grace.

In an amazing way, the John Malkovich I know (Con Air, In The Line Of Fire,) or rather thought I knew, is not the one who shows up here is a wounded animal of a man trying to get right with his own life. It obviously takes a big person to apologize, but it takes a bigger one to repent, to admit wrong, and to do right. Disgrace is about trying to do right, but falling back into the same manipulative patterns of behavior. Really, Disgrace is a lot like real life, but life without God to step in and provide that grace we all need.