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Volume CXXXIII, Number 11 |
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Human Stain is a little messy
HANNAH TUCKER
STAFF WRITER
The Human Stain, now playing at the Eveningstar Cinema and based on the novel by Philip Roth, is the retelling of a life story. Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), a professor of classics at a small New England college who is publicly disgraced by charges of racism and his love affair with a much younger woman (Nicole Kidman), begins to examine how the secrets of his identity have come to haunt the final moments of his life.
The advantage of the film is, most cynically, this: Roth's novel is a dense, long Pulitzer-winning slab of a book that makes its reader wait a full hundred pages before revealing Coleman Silk's capital-S Secret, while the movie is 106 minutes long and you get to see Nicole Kidman naked.
Of course, that's a little unfair. Most of what the film takes from the novel, it represents very accurately and respectfully. But, much like Coleman's performance of identity, it's not so much what's there that's insufficient; it's the knowledge of what's been kept from us that makes us feel deceived. The individual relationships are beautifully conveyed in the film.
Aware of the complexity of Roth's characters (and doubtless not ignorant of box-office strategy), The Human Stain is full of great actors and acting: Ed Harris as Kidman's unhinged ex-husband, Gary Sinise as the local novelist and narrator, Anna Deavere Smith as Coleman's mother. But all that wattage just draws attention to the fact that everyone seems a bit underused. Even if you haven't read the novel, you might get the sense that you are stumbling into a story that has been pieced together out of something much bigger than the sum of its parts.
What The Human Stain lacks is not human emotion or human beauty, but human connectedness, the sense that no relationship or single element of one's life can exist within a vacuum. The film can't possibly show the ways Roth's characters both search for and recoil from their connections to each other; it can't replicate effectively the voice of Professor Delphine Roux, Coleman's faculty nemesis, who provides the novel's ironic refrain of "Everyone knows."
That Roux is relegated to such a minor character in the film is telling; the film can't get at the depths of the lie of that claim when it comes to race, love, and identity in contemporary culture, even when that culture is a college town, a sleepy microcosm of supposed transparent liberalism and opportunity.
What we can know, however, is that while snow on cedars and some A-list sexy-dancing might well be worth $6 at the Eveningstar, to us privileged Bowdoinites the book comes free.
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