Human Stain Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)November 11th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE HUMAN STAIN
Directed by Robert Benton from the novel by Philip Roth
Rated R, 106 minutes
The movie version of a novel is a compromise. That's the nature of the beast. The better-known the book, the bigger the challenge. Director and screenwriter go over and over it, anatomize and dissect, crack the spine, extract what they take to be the marrow. If all goes well, the creature brought to life on screen has a splendid wholeness and a life of its own. But it's impossible to get it all, and often the missing parts of the novel haunt the film like spooks, unseen and unknowable, but disturbing in their absence.
That's "spooks" as in ghosts, specters. There's another meaning, one on which the story of Philip Roth's novel turns. Dean Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), professor of classics at a small New England college, muses aloud about two students who have not shown up in five weeks of class: "Are they real people, or are they spooks?" The phantom students turn out to be African-American, and they raise the cry of racism. Coleman is censured by the college. When he points out the dictionary definition of the word, his colleagues reprove him: "Did you read the second definition, Dean Silk? 'A derogatory epithet for a Negro.'" The college uses a politically sensitive dictionary; in Webster's Third, the racial slang is the fourth entry, and is attributed to Langston Hughes.
Coleman quits in outrage. His wife Iris (Phyllis Newman) is so outraged that she drops dead. Coleman becomes a bit unhinged. He barges in on a neighbor, the writer Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), demanding that he write a novel about the whole sorry mess. Nathan refuses, and Coleman decides to write it himself, but he and Nathan become friends. When the book is finished, Coleman recognizes it as crap. But by then he has moved on to a new
obsession.
Faunia Farrell (Nicole Kidman) is a janitor at the college. She's 34 and Coleman is 71, but there's something attractive to her about the end-of-the-line quality of an old man stripped of romantic illusion (and reinforced with Viagra.) Faunia's currency is sex, and that's what she and Coleman share. "This is more than sex," he murmurs. "No it's not," she says. "You just forgot what sex is."
In that year of 1998, the country was obsessed with sex. The Lewinsky scandal stirred up America's latent Puritanism like mud from the bottom of a pond. The hypocrisy of our fixation with sexual judgmentalism and political correctness is one of the triad of issues that drives this story. A second is our delusion about the separability of war and peace. Les Farrell (Ed Harris), Faunia's ex-husband, did two tours of duty in Vietnam learning to be a killing machine, and returned home a casualty of war who could not remove the psychotic scars along with his uniform. Thirty years later he is still a throbbing pulse of danger.
There is a third delusion which has to do with race and identity. It is the story's central theme, and it's a secret. The movie doesn't keep this secret for very long, nor does the book. It's Coleman's secret, and no one else's. It's explored in extensive flashbacks to Coleman's youth in East Orange, NJ (where he's played by a fine young British actor named Wentworth Miller), and it lends an extra dimension to the charge that ended his academic career. It's hard to talk about the story without discussing it, but in a space this short, we can let it go.
One of the great puzzlements of "The Human Stain" is the casting. Hopkins is a great actor, but with all his talent and craft he is not capable of suggesting that he has ever been within fifty miles of East Orange. Nor is he capable of suggesting an evolution from Miller, even allowing for the ravages of half a century. And he is never convincing as the carrier of The Secret. Put aside those complaints and you get a terrific performance out of Sir Anthony. But if the producers were set on casting a great English actor in the role, what was Ben Kingsley doing that was so important when they called? They must have called him first.
Kidman is another matter. The Australian actress has been criticized as too beautiful for the role of Faunia, an illiterate, sexually battered, tough-talking woman who has fallen from a good family to the wrong side of the tracks. But beauty is subjective. The Faunia we see is the Faunia Coleman sees. Kidman masters the American vernacular as Hopkins never even tries to, and she evokes the tough, fragile hopelessness of the woman. Sinise, and especially Harris, also do excellent work, and mention should be made of Jacinda Barrett as the Midwestern beauty who is young Coleman's first love.
Nicholas Meyer has done a conscientious job of adapting Roth's intense, brilliantly complex novel, and Robert Benton directs with gentleness and moments of inspiration. The movie, like Faunia, is sexually direct, though ultimately it traffics in full frontal language and reserves a certain delicacy of image. It doesn't rise to the level of Roth's novel - it's not as good a movie as it could be, haunted as it is by the spooks of the larger tale. But there's plenty there to think about.
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