"The Human Stain"

The tightly reined-in sexuality of the actress Mimi Kuzyk, as the faculty member who spearheads the end of Coleman's career and sends an anonymous note telling him he's exploiting an abused woman by sleeping with Faunia, speaks an obvious truth about the people who feel so ready to judge the sexual relationships of others. Have any of us, if we're honest, ever encountered someone who objected to a consensual sexual relationship between adults who didn't also strike us, at some basic level, as being profoundly uncomfortable with sex?

But these are fleetingly recognizable moments. Meyer's attempts to ground the movie in its particular political milieu, as well as to address the larger sexual and racial issues, only end up emphasizing how far this polite, handsome movie is from Roth's anger. It opens with three academics talking about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, one of them saying that if only Clinton had fucked her she would have been his to control. As ugly as that is, it pales next to the language in Roth's novel: "If Clinton had ... turned her over in the Oval Office and fucked her in the ass, none of this would have happened."

Elsewhere, Rachel Portman's tinklingly sensitive piano score, and the late Jean-Yves Escoffier's autumnal cinematography, lie over the film as heavily as the snow that blankets its climactic scenes. The film is an illustration of its source rather than an adaptation of it. Much has been written about the miscasting of Hopkins as Coleman Silk and Nicole Kidman as Faunia Farley. In a way, though, they are perfectly suited to this movie, which is more interested in demonstrable displays of skill than of messy passion. Their actorly precision is both skillful and all wrong. J. Hoberman, in the Village Voice, uses Hopkins' casting to take a swipe at casting white actors in black roles. It would be more fitting to see the casting of Hopkins as the latest example of the American belief that real acting, and real culture, come from Europe.

Casting Hopkins in the role of a black man posing as a Jew is about as absurd as casting Bernie Mac in the role. And yet part of the point of the character is the mutability of race. Hopkins isn't lazy. He's in here pitching from start to finish, and he's sometimes very touching, as when he sits up in bed after making love with Faunia, in a state of confused ecstasy about how he wound up in this desirable woman's bed. It's not that Hopkins' clipped Welsh tones are wrong for a black character -- it's that they are wrong for an American character.

Kidman, predictably, overdoes the working-class stuff. You never forget that this is Nicole Kidman doing an impersonation of a poor, battered woman. But she seems to have something in her that allows her to keep her dignity even when she's not up to the part (or, as in Lars von Trier's upcoming, and atrocious, "Dogville," being abused by the sadist behind the camera). Kidman's best moment comes early, when Coleman fumbles with matches to light Faunia's cigarette and she gives a smile that is part withering amusement, part turned-on by a man in her sexual thrall.

What's most disturbing about Kidman's performance is the way Benton and Escoffier have shot her nude scenes so that we don't see anything. The moment Coleman sees her lying nude on her bed, and Kidman is artfully arranged to keep us from seeing either breasts or pubis, is emblematic of the reserved tones of the whole movie. When she moves up and down on top of Hopkins while they are making love, we're conscious of the camera moving to keep her breasts out of frame. Predictably, the young actress Jacinda Barrett, who plays the young Coleman's Midwestern girlfriend and who, not being a star, is not accorded the protection of fame, takes her clothes off. The surreal quality of the sex scenes in "The Human Stain" is that they embody sexual hypocrisy in a movie that is meant to be exposing sexual hypocrisy.

Both Sinise, who is too young to play Zuckerman and whose narration is irritatingly nasal, and Ed Harris, as Kidman's ex, give showy performances that are unusual for them (though they are very good in their shared scene, the movie's final one). As the young Coleman, the young actor Wentworth Miller gives an impressive performance that suggests the anger that's been bled out of the movie. Unfortunately, we don't quite get the conflict between his loyalty to his family and his desire to pass. One look at his uptight, upright, respectable family life and you couldn't blame anyone for beating down the door to get out. Part of the problem is that his mother is played by that imperious drag Anna Deavere Smith, who is as appalling as always. Smith seems unable to play a scene or deliver a line to a fellow actor without making it sound like an interrogation or an accusation.

There are good, brief performances from a quartet of actresses: Kerry Washington, fresh as always and, here, insinuating, as a young woman from Coleman's past; Lizan Mitchell as Coleman's sister; the fine character actress Margo Martindale as Les' court-appointed psychiatrist; and Phyllis Newman as Coleman's wife. Newman's one small scene is an expert portrayal of near-obsessive organization struggling to keep the lid on panic.

As a drama about racial passing, "The Human Stain" is nowhere near as good as Douglas Sirk's 1959 remake of "Imitation of Life." That's not intended as a flip comparison between the film version of a respected novel and a famous weeper. Sirk's is perhaps the strongest, most uncompromised movie about race ever made in this country, a mixture of craziness and acute observation that blurs the lines between virtue and narcissism, between racial pride and racial submission, until the issues it raises are unresolvable. It's melodrama that rises to the complexity of art. "The Human Stain" takes a complex work of literary art and reduces it to tasteful melodrama. Its smallness is simply crushing.

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