The Human Stain, directed by Robert Benton from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, is an honorable B+ term paper of a movie: sober, scrupulous and earnestly respectful of its literary source. This is precisely the problem: that source, Philip Roth’s 2000 novel is not especially sober, scrupulous or respectful. It is an angry, ungainly squally of a book, a clamorous defense of sexual vitality in an age of Puritan censoriousness and a lyrical inquiry into the mysteries of race, old age and recent. American history. Like much of Mr. Roth’s recent work, The Human Stain bursts with characters and ideas, and its apparently haphazard organization disguises an elegant and cunning narrative strategy.
The filmmakers explicate Mr. Roth’s themes with admirable clarity and care and observe his characters with delicate fondness, but they cannot hope to approximate the brilliance and rapacity of his voice, which holds all the novels’ disparate elements together. Without the active intervention of Mr. Roth’s intelligence the story fails to cohere. Its people wander through a strangely artificial landscape, and the ideas hover in the air above them like clouds painted on a backdrop.
Zuckerman played by Gary Sinise has retreated to a lakeside cabin in New England, hoping to find peace and quiet after two divorces and a bout of prostate cancer.
His solitude is interrupted one night by the arrival of Coleman Silk played by Anthony Hopkins, a former dean and classics professor at nearby Athena College, who was forced to resign after being accused of making racist remarks during a lecture. Coleman, whose wife died suddenly in the wake of the scandal, wants to take revenge on his former colleagues by writing a book. He puts this project aside once he falls into a revivifying affair with Faunia Farley played by Nicole Kidman, a damaged, desolate and illiterate 34-year-old who does menial jobs at the college, the post office and a local dairy farm Their sexual idyll is menaced by the faculty busybodies who chased Coleman from his job, and also by Faunia’s former husband, Lester (Ed Harris), a deranged Vietnam veteran who sued to beat her and now stalks her in his big red pickup truck.
What keeps the movie, which opens today nationwide, from drifting in the Sargasso Sea of literary high-mindedness is the vitality of the acting. Mr. Bention is the kind of director whose affection and respect for actors seep through the screen; his solicitude seems to open them up.
That Mr.Hopkins and Ms. Kidman are miscast is almost axiomatic. Ms. Kidman tries to overcome this by sheer force of will, struggling to stifle her natural radiance, blunt her crystalline voice and blur her fine features, and she comes closer to succeeding than you might expect. Mr. Hopkins, for his part, must battle a more glaring discrepancy, and he does so with swinging nonchalance. Coleman Silk is a black man who has passed for white for most of his adult life, styling himself as the first Jewish classicist ever hired at Athena.
These peculiarities of casting matter less than they might; or rather how much they matter changes from scene to scene. The film includes some sex, a boxing match and an occasional burst of dancing, but most of the action consists of two characters in a room talking. Some of these moments-a late confrontation between Lester and Zuckerman, a breakfast table quarrel between Faunnia and Coleman, a meeting of the minds between Faunnia and a large, caged crow-are awkwardly paced and placed, but many others are alive with human pain and heat.
Some of the best performances are in secondary roles. Jacinda Barrett is wonderfully touching as Coleman’s first great love, a blond Midwesterner to whom he decides, heedlessly and a little cruelly, to divulge the secret of his race. Ms. Snuth, her face a mask of maternal stoicism, brings home the tragedy of Coleman’s decision to pass for white with a speech so drily and evenly enunciated that its lacerating insight only registers once the camera has turned away.
At its beat-which also tends to be at its quietes—The Human Stain allows you both to care about its characters and to think about the larger issues that their lives represent. Its deepest flaw is an inability to link those moments of empathy and insight into a continuous drama, to suggest that the characters’ lives keep going when they are not on screen. The film’s powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.
1. The human Stain is a（ ）.
2. The Human Stain（ ）.
3. Which of the following is the flaw of The Human Stain in the author’s opinion?
4. Which of the following could be a possible comment made by the author?
5. The author’s attitude towards The Human Stain is（ ）.
