You see the names Hopkins, Kidman, Sinise and Harris on the marquee for a film adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winner’s best-selling novel and you figure, boy, is this ever going to be good. But, for a host of reasons, “The Human Stain” fails to live up to anything but the most modest expectations. Let’s start with Reason No. 1: The source material. Philip Roth’s drawn-out, scattershot musings on race and sex set during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is/was practically unfilmmable. Robert Benton, a skilled director, but an even better writer, gives it his best shot. But in the end, the film proves as difficult to make heads or tails of as it must have been to produce. Which brings us to a second reason the film falters: Benton left the writing to someone else — Nicholas Meyer, who is best known for scripting the adaptation of his own best-selling Sherlock Holmes novel, “The Seven Percent Solution.” Ah, if only Sherlock were around to tie up all the loose ends in “The Human Stain.”
Anthony Hopkins stars as Coleman Silk, an esteemed college dean and professor at an idyllic east coast liberal arts college who is living with a big secret. In one truly bad day, he’s unjustly fired from his job for making a dubious racial slur, goes home to deliver the news to his wife, only to have it kill her — literally. He’s understandably peeved, and hopes to exact revenge by convincing a reclusive writer (Gary Sinise as Roth’s doppelganger) to pen a scathing expose. The pair strike up a friendship, and it is then that we learn — through flashbacks — that Silk is not Jewish, as he has long claimed to be, but rather a light-skinned black man from New Jersey who abandoned his heritage in order to get ahead in culturally biased America. Now, if you’ll buy Hopkins — British accent and all — as a black man from Jersey, well, perhaps I can interest you in some red-hot mountainside property in Southern California. Better yet, how about Nicole Kidman as an illiterate janitor who falls for A-Hop? Really. Like most everyone else in the film, she’s dreadfully miscast, but that doesn’t stop the Academy Award-winner from chewing up the role for all its worth. Which isn’t much, unfortunately. Just like the movie. (Rated R for language and sexual-ity/nudity. Running time: 106 minutes)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 31, 2003. Read the original PDF.