Sheer folly, you might think, to try to turn Philip Roth's sublime novel into a movie, but this is not quite as bad as it could have been and there are some moments to savour. Yet, after jettisoning much of the narrative, Nicholas Meyer's script and Robert Benton's direction approach the remains with too much reverence.
Considering the weighty matters under discussion - the denial of ethnic origin for personal advancement; late-flowering love across the divides of class, intellect and age; the destruction of a career through the petty bureaucracy of political correctness - it would be churlish to accuse the film-makers of degrading their subject. But they are culpable of something; perhaps, like the protagonist Coleman Silk himself, of denial.
Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a distinguished 70-year-old Jewish professor of classics who, after referring to two missing students as "spooks", is hauled before the college board over what is perceived as a racial remark. Unknown to Silk, who has never set eyes on them, the absentee students are black. Silk resigns, and, shocked by his treatment, his wife dies from an embolism. All of this in the first 10 minutes - no wonder Silk is angry.
He seeks out Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a once well-known writer suffering from a serious block, to tell his story. Zuckerman's refusal doesn't stop them becoming fast friends and soon Silk confides that he is having an affair with a woman less than half his age, Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman). It transpires that both Silk and Farley harbour secrets about their past which will impact on their lives in the present.
Apart from the severe miscasting of Hopkins and Kidman, who act a lot without achieving anything like the conviction their characters demand, the film suffers from a fractured and uneven structure as it flips back and forth between the late 1940s (with Wentworth Miller as the young Silk) and the summer of 1998 and the Clinton/Monica scandal. And, for a story fuelled by sex (and Viagra), it remains curiously unerotic. Finally, in an almost fatal manoeuvre, Meyer and Benton attempt to replicate Roth's literary sleight of hand that reveals Silk's racial identity.
An honourable enough failure, but a failure nonetheless.
The Human Stain
Cert: cert18
