The Human Stain
Germany/USA 2003
Reviewed by Xan Brooks
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
A college town in Massachusetts, 1998. Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) - former university dean and professor of classics - quits his post after being accused of racism after referring to a pair of absent students as "spooks". He holds the faculty responsible for the subsequent sudden death of his wife, Iris. Embittered, Silk attempts to persuade a reclusive novelist, Nathan Zuckerman, to write up an account of the scandal and the pair strike up a friendship.
Silk begins a relationship with a local woman 30 years his junior. Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) holds down three low-wage jobs and is traumatised by the death of her two infant children in a house fire. She also lives in fear of her violent ex-husband, Vietnam vet Lester (Ed Harris). A series of flashbacks reveal Silk's secret past. He is a light-skinned African-American who has fled his past. Silk has told no one of his true identity: not his wife, nor his colleagues at the college that has ostracised him. At the end of his life he confesses everything to Faunia, who embraces him. Later the pair are forced off the road by Lester and crash into a frozen lake. Their deaths are filed as an accident by the authorities. Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) meets Lester and tells him that he is about to start work on the story of Coleman Silk.
Review
Philip Roth's 2000 novel The Human Stain spun the tale of a light-skinned African-American who passes as Jewish, becomes a successful educator and is then undone in a political row after he refers to a pair of absent black students as "spooks". Perhaps prompted by the true-life case of civil servant David Howard (who lost his job when his use of the word "niggardly" was misconstrued as a racist insult), the book was at once a rumination on the American culture of self-invention and a ferocious assault on political-correctness that used the Clinton impeachment scandal as its touchstone. Robert Benton's well-toned adaptation is faithful to the letter of Roth's work, but a crucial ingredient is missing. There is no anger to the film at all.
It's as if the makers expended all their energies ensuring that the author's famously forensic, rigorously literary structure survived the move to the screen intact. By and large they do a decent job. The Human Stain shows its hand with a deft deliberation. In gliding between the almost-present (the late 1990s) and the post-war past, it mounts a rich study in character. Fuelled by ambition, Silk betrays his roots and disowns his family. He side-steps the institutionalised pitfalls of one era before (oh, poetic justice) blundering into the more insidious man-traps of another. If we can never quite applaud Silk for his actions, we at least understand the reasons behind them.
This is partly due to some restrained and disciplined playing by Anthony Hopkins and Wentworth Miller in the difficult roles of, respectively, Silk present and Silk past. Nicole Kidman, by contrast, is a borderline disaster. As Faunia Farley - the cleaning lady who provides Silk with some sexual healing - the actress swishes her hair and flouts her tattoos as a substitute for acting. Time and again, she contorts her features into a slow, heavy-lidded smile that is clearly intended to suggest a dangerous carnality but actually makes her look drunk and befuddled. Veteran director Benton ( Kramer vs. Kramer , Twilight ) unwittingly compounds her embarrassment by framing Kidman's antics in constant honey-lit slow-motion. Away in the wings, Roth's supporting characters - narrator-figure Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), Vietnam vet Les (Ed Harris) - find their roles gently streamlined.
There is a key scene in both the book and the film in which a euphoric Silk dances Zuckerman around his living room. In the novel, Zuckerman is recovering from prostate cancer and the exertion makes him wet himself. In the movie, he walks away dry and intact. This is a minor omission, but it nonetheless spotlights a wider flaw. As brokered by Benton, this adaptation is finally too genteel and respectful for its own good. The Human Stain ticks all the right plot boxes and touches on all the correct themes. But it also drains off Roth's bile and blunts his polemic. It is a well-dressed, good-looking wax dummy of a film. There is no piss on its trousers, no blood in its veins.
Credits
- Director
- Robert Benton
- Producers
- Tom Rosenberg
- Gary Lucchesi
- Scott Steindorff
- Screenplay
- Nicholas Meyer
- Based on the novel by Philip Roth
- Director of Photography
- Jean Yves Escoffier
- Editor
- Christopher Tellefsen
- Production Designer
- David Gropman
- Music
- Rachel Portman