Film Reviews

The Human Stain

• Rating:
• Director: Robert Benton
• Starring: Anna Deavere Smith
• Details: US / 105 mins / (15PG).

Based on the Phillip Roth novel, 'The Human Stain' is an austere, overly sombre adaptation which fails to capture the sheer complexity and moral ambiguity of its subject matter. A hopelessly miscast Anthony Hopkins plays Coleman Silk, a classics professor at a plush New England college. Born with extremely light skin to black parents, Coleman, we learn, has been running from his past his entire adult life, leading him to invent a history for himself which doesn't include his working class African-American family. After he loses his job for an unintentional alleged racial slur - the film's backdrop is a hyper moralistic America at the height of the Bill Clinton impeachment trial - Coleman asks writer Nathan Zuckerman (Sinise) to write his story, including details of his affair with the 34-year-old Faunia Farley (Kidman). Laden down with emotional baggage, Farley's on the run from her violent ex-husband, Lester (Harris), who is no longer on speaking terms with his sanity.

Roth is a literary colossus, and the depth and density of his characters and themes is not easy to transfer. Screenwriter Nicholas Meyer tries to get a handle on Roth's thrilling ideas, but in choosing to compress them in a clumsy, heavyhanded fashion, he merely highlights his own inefficiency in distilling the natural rhythms of the author's intelligence and superlative prose. The casting is bit off too, and while the two leads do their best with parts which clearly aren't for them: Hopkins never fully convinces - even if he does wounded pride better than almost any other actor working today - while Kidman is simply too illuminating, even dressed down, to pass for anything other than a head turner. True, it's far from a disaster - some scenes work rather well and the supporting performances are uniformly excellent - but 'The Human Stain's lack of cohesion undermines its ultimate effectiveness.

Review by Garreth Murphy