"The Human Stain"

Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman team up for a decent, sincere big-screen fable -- but the scourging fury of Philip Roth's novel is nowhere in sight.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 31, 2003 | As a novel, Philip Roth's "The Human Stain," and the two books that preceded it in a loose trilogy, is perhaps the greatest achievement by our greatest living writer, a penetrating epic vision of American life and politics unequaled in American art since the first two "Godfather" films.

The new movie version of "The Human Stain," directed by Robert Benton and adapted by Nicholas Meyer, shows how it's possible to be faithful to the particulars of a novel and completely miss its sensibility.

Benton's film isn't a disgrace. It's an intelligent, handsome adaptation that doesn't sand off all of Roth's sharp edges, and it gives you the rare (these days, anyway) feeling of watching a movie made for adults. It would be easier to pan if it were worse. It's almost inevitable when a disappointing movie is made of a great book for people to claim that movies can never equal books. But we've seen enough great adaptations of difficult books (Jack Clayton's "The Innocents," his version of "The Turn of the Screw"; Kubrick's "Lolita"; John Huston's film of James Joyce's "The Dead"; Paul Mazurzky's "Enemies, a Love Story"; Philip Kaufman's version of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"; Lynne Ramsay's film of "Morvern Callar," to name just a few) to see that it's not impossible for a movie to capture a book's particulars as well as its sensibility.

To be fair to Benton and Meyer, Roth's are difficult books to capture, being largely dependent on his incisively cranky voice. "The Human Stain" is the last in a trilogy that deals with the political insanity of three distinct American eras, '60s radicalism in "American Pastoral," '50s McCarthyist hysteria in I Married a Communist," and self-righteous delusions of the Clinton impeachment scandal in "The Human Stain." Roth wrote that that era was defined by "the ecstasy of sanctimony," and called it a time when "the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing."

You can't say that the filmmakers have ignored the fury in Roth's novel. But they've done what they can to muffle it. Both novel and movie are narrated by Roth's stand-in, the writer Nathan Zuckerman (here played by Gary Sinise). Zuckerman is the observer to the tragedy of Coleman Silk, an elderly, tenured classics professor who loses his job at a small Massachusetts college in an instance of politically correct absurdity. Noting, five weeks into the term, that three students have never shown up for class, he asks of the absent trio, "Do they exist, or are they spooks?" It turns out that the three students are black, and Coleman is accused by one of using a racial epithet. (Lest anyone think this is ridiculous, recall the professor who got into trouble for using the word "niggardly.")

Shortly after that charge is made, Coleman's wife dies, which he attributes directly to the turmoil their life is thrown into, and he begins an affair with Faunia Farley, a young cleaning woman who's dealing with, among other things, being stalked by her abusive ex-husband Les, a disturbed Vietnam vet. Coleman's affair with Faunia seems, in the judgmental eyes of his former colleagues, yet more evidence of his political incorrectness.

This is all, in a way, a preamble, to the secret at the heart of "The Human Stain." Coleman is, in reality, a black man who has spent his life passing as a Jew. (The character was based on the New York Times critic Anatole Broyard, who also spent his life passing for white.)

The connection that Roth, as well as the filmmakers, draws between all these events is the impossibility of living an honest life in a country so enamored of sexual and racial hypocrisy. Roth's decision to write about racial passing was a kind of literary kismet. The constraints that ethnicity puts on self-realization, the mortal tug of war between feeling pride and feeling suffocation, has been one of Roth's great subjects (never more explosively than in his "Operation: Shylock"). It's what's gotten various half-wits to accuse Roth of being a self-loathing Jew. And it's what makes it impossible to condemn Coleman's passing. He's right to apprehend that the road open to him as a "colored scholar" would be a far narrower one than if he were white.

Reading "The Human Stain," you can't help but hear the voices of the people who claimed, "If Clinton had merely told the truth, he'd have been all right." It wasn't the smallness of that statement that was crushing but the naiveté. No one in America is ever all right by telling the truth, which is never a "mere" proposition. Especially when it comes to race and sex, and especially in an era when prissy moralism poses as sensitivity.

Some of that comes through in Benton and Meyer's movie. In the scene where Coleman (Anthony Hopkins) tells Zuckerman that he's having an affair with a woman years younger than he is, he talks of the wonder of having the sexual desire he thought dead suddenly brought ferociously to life at such a late age. The wonder in Hopkins' voice, the celebration of his resurrected libido, reminds you of why feminist critics have consistently made Roth such a target. Because he has never denied the rapacity of the male sexual instinct. (Harsh as it sounds, I have yet to hear a feminist argument against Roth that is the product of a working brain instead of a jerking knee.)

Next Page: Casting a Welshman to play a black American playing a Jew

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