Movie Review:

The Human Stain

    Great books rarely make good movies, largely due to the constraints of film.  Hundreds of pages are not easily condensed into two hours, and so changes are made.  Supporting characters are downgraded or forgotten entirely.  Plots are cut for time or smashed together to fit everything in.  In addition, important plot points and even themes can be changed on the way to the screen (think about John Huston's Moby Dick, in which Ahab kills the whale and ends up with the girl, a complete reversal of Melville's novel).

    The film adaptation of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, written by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Robert Benton, does all of these things.  In choosing to focus on a theme that Roth himself seemed content to leave on the back burner, however, the film succeeds as something separate from the novel (all the best adaptations are able to have this distance without destroying the author's original intentions).

    Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a classics professor at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts who resigns in disgrace after a supposed incident of racism is blown out of proportion.  He goes to see novelist Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a Roth regular, and the two become friends.   It is through Zuckerman that we learn the details of Coleman's life, including his affair with Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman).

    Coleman and Faunia pair off initially for no real reason - mutual loneliness, perhaps.  It turns out that the two have much more in common, though we learn Faunia's story through her various fits of emotion and Coleman's story through managed flashback.

    Coleman has been passing for Jewish for the better part of fifty years - but, as it turns out, he is really a very light-skinned black man.  Having lost his first love due to his race, Coleman turned his back on his African-American heritage (much to the anger and dismay of his family, most of whom disowned him) and passed himself off as a white man, never even telling his wife of 40 years.

    Faunia, too, was disowned by her family, and Coleman seems to recognize in her a kindred spirit - a disgust for where she came from, and the need to hide from it.  She is also hiding from a deranged ex-husband, Lester (Ed Harris), who blames her for the death of their children in a fire and seems to have an anti-Semitic streak running through him.

    This is where The Human Stain runs into its problems.  Even someone unfamiliar with the book should be able to see the scissor marks, which are everywhere.  It's easy to see that Lester's role was much more fleshed out in the book; here he has only a few scenes, and his anti-Semitic comments about Coleman seem more designed to stamp "bad guy" on his forehead than to deepen his character.  Roth's book focused very much on the American landscape of the mid-to-late 1990s, but the film (one of two currently out to make prominent reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, along with Shattered Glass) uses the time period as a backdrop, not as a reference.

    Cutting is a necessity in the transition to film, so it should not be an automatic problem - and it's not, but that the cuts are so obvious is.  To wonder why something came up only to be neglected for the rest of the film is distracting.

    Making up for that problem are the performances, which are excellent.  Hopkins, Kidman, and Sinise are all great, and Harris is good too, though quite underused.  If a lesser actor were playing the part of Coleman, it would be easier to say, "Well, come on - even supposedly passing for white for 50 years, I don't believe for a second he's the least bit black."  With Hopkins, it never even comes up.  Also excellent is newcomer Wentworth Miller, playing the young Coleman - he goes toe to toe with Hopkins as they play the same character, and holds his own.

    The Human Stain wants to do too much and simultaneously not enough, and it sort of falls all over itself trying to cram as much as it can into a slim 100 minutes.  It still holds up thematically, and has some nice performances, but it feels like a rush was put on the plot, which makes for a less enjoyable watch than it would otherwise have provided.   This is not to say that it is not a good film - it is - but it could have been more.

    All the pieces were there for The Human Stain to be a great film, but they didn't all make it to the screen.  B+

The Human Stain is a Miramax release.  Rated for language and sexuality/nudity.