The Human Stain
Protean and peevish, supple and lewd, drunk on words and outraged at hypocrisy: Philip Roth has one of the most unique, if arguably narrow, voices in American fiction. In Robert Benton's adaptation of Roth's 2000 novel ''The Human Stain,'' that voice has been replaced with the spare Midwestern twang of Gary Sinise, and that's only the beginning of the film's problems.
Sinise plays author Nathan Zuckerman -- Roth's stand-in in several of his novels -- who is impotently waiting out writer's block in rural Massachusetts when he is visited by Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), a disgraced classics professor and dean of faculty at a small Williams-like college. Silk is a figure of towering charisma who has been laid low by a misperceived racial comment and the subsequent death of his wife (Phyllis Newman); he comes to Zuckerman seeking to dictate his vengeance onto paper. The writer declines, the two men become friends, and Silk lets slip that he is having an affair with a college cleaning woman half his age.
This is Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) -- illiterate, bodacious, cynical, doomed -- and in the book she was a bad idea lit up only by Roth's sympathetic wordplay. An aging author writing about an aging professor engaging in torrid sex with a younger woman? You might call that wish-fulfillment if you're feeling kind; the fact remains that Faunia bears little resemblance to any actual woman who might wander through life or across a movie screen. She's a literary construct, and Kidman has no place to go with her except into the valley of the shadow of overacting, reaching her career nadir in a scene (notably not in the book) in which she mourns the fate of her late children while simultaneously grasping for an Oscar that remains out of reach.
The other sections of ''The Human Stain'' delve into Coleman's past, and here I have to divulge some plot-spoilers that are, in any event, revealed about 40 minutes in. Everyone thinks the professor is Jewish, but he's not -- he's a light-skinned black who has been passing for white since WWII and who has long exiled himself from his middle-class New Jersey family. Benton and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer are at their strongest in the scenes set in the past, as the avid young Coleman (well played by Wentworth Miller) tangles in the amateur boxing ring, with white girlfriends, and with his sorrowing mother (woodenly played, unfortunately, by playwright Anna Deavere Smith). You sense the difficulty of Coleman's choice, as well as his stubbornness in pursuing it: the refusal to be defined by anything but his own ambition is the character's greatest strength and most grievous flaw.
Hopkins, against all odds, carries this struggle into the film's modern-day scenes. Of course it's ridiculous for a Welsh actor to play a black man passing, but Hopkins was an equally absurd choice to play Richard Nixon, and he made that work. Here he gets you to believe in Coleman's dilemma in the context of the film -- which is all that matters -- and he beautifully tills the ground where pride shades into blindness, which is to say the ground of tragedy itself.
The great irony of Roth's book is that by the 1990s, ''passing for white'' was a concept that no longer had any currency in American culture, and so Coleman's decision was rendered meaningless. Benton, in the film's final scenes, settles for a much smaller irony -- that a covertly black man has been humbled for uttering a racial slur -- and lets it go at that. You can almost hear the scope of the project being downsized.
But that's to be expected when you distill literature -- and ornery and flawed as it is, ''The Human Stain'' qualifies -- into the box of a two-hour commercial film. ''Stain'' the book contains multitudes: rants about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, digressions about pre-war Newark, exegeses on campus political correctness, lyrical evocations of intergenerational sex, pitiless comedy about shellshocked Vietnam veterans, nutty monologues between women and crows.
''Stain'' the movie reduces Faunia's ex-husband (Ed Harris) to just another Hollywood 'Nam psycho waiting to blow. Worse, it sees Faunia herself as the one (and only) thing Roth didn't -- a victim. Benton, miraculously, has achieved the worst of both worlds. He has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.
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