The Human Stain


by Shari L. Rosenblum

Robert Benton's The Human Stain, based on Philip Roth's novel of sanctimonious ragings against sanctimony, is a self-important out-of-touch entry into the pantheon of faux-liberal cinema. In one of the opening scenes, three male students cut across a college campus discussing Monica Lewinsky and pontificating on the missteps Clinton took that got him into this predicament. The set-up is almost comically unsophisticated, directed and acted, as it were, with the grace and subtlety of a late-night Cinemax spectacle. The moment is unmistakable -- Benton (after Roth) thinks he's caught America (rather than its erstwhile president) with its pants down. And he wants to spank it. There is potential in that, but the spanking here turns out to be a tedious bit of expository pedantry, so heavy-handed that the red marks on one's consciousness remain days after the film has run its last reel.

The film focuses on Dean Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), Jewish professor of Classics whose "Jewishness" is mentioned so often in the film's exposition, and with an imbalance so outdated (worthy only of a Jewish solipsist or an obsessed Nazi), that it quickly becomes obvious even to the proverbial blind man on horseback that something about Dean Silk's heritage is not quite kosher.

One day, Jewish Dean Silk stands in front of his class and detours from his painfully contrived summary of Greek literature (foreshadowing traced by a paint roller) into innocent grumblings against eternally truant students. Wouldn't you know it, the Jewish professor's words are misconstrued by the overzealous faculty and manipulative students, and he is suddenly accused of uttering racial slurs. Political correctness is here the handmaiden of judging the President -- it's the world gone awry. To keep the contrivances going, Dean Silk defends himself with an argument not much stronger than Clinton's own: rather than point to his record, his reputation or the other students in the class, he merely argues that he could not have meant the slur because having never seen the students, he could not have known they were black. The weakness of this argument is a sneaky plot point, though. It implies a necesssary visual cognizance into racism. Looks can be deceiving, or perhaps more appropriately, what you don't see is what you get.

Soon, Dean Silk is out of work. As is only natural for an irascible ex-professor, he takes up with a hot uneducated little number 40 years his junior who holds down three odd jobs, but can't hold on to an accent (which is fine, as the accent she's been given is inappropriate for the class, role, and background she later comes to describe as her own). Faunia Farely (Nicole Kidman) is gorgeous and tragic and not for a second believable. But it is consistent with the film's lack of logic or perspective that she invites the Jewish Dean Silk into her bed the first time they meet and that the two fall in love. They each have a secret, but oddly, no one understands them. Individually or together. It's a match made in fiction -- an old man's fantasy (Silk is a man of 71, rather close to Roth's 70 years) made celluloid. Again.

Nicole Kidman does not carry her role. Brooding and depressed Jersey trash is not something her body molds to comfortably. And she is utterly unpersuasive in every scene, particularly when she is embracing Hopkins (a visual that I find not only implausible, but untenable). Hopkins, too, in all his Welshness, is horribly miscast here, and not just because he doesn't look remotely Jewish. He looks even less like poised, good-looking Wentworth Miller, who plays the character aptly as a young man. They tell me Hopkins is a fine actor, and I used to believe that. But now I believe that he may just have been passing.

Other performances in the film are perfunctory, even acceptable in places. Ed Harris and Gary Sinise are given one awkward note to play apiece, but they manage the note, and there's something to be said for that. The writing, however, is unsalvageable. And the direction inexcusable. Lord knows where the editor was. The Human Stain is a film about judgment and error, about the pressures society imposes and gives in to, about running away and about facing demons. Or so it means to be. Alas, though -- early on, it veers from that path, slips and slides and falls into its own way, and finally drowns in its false depths.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene