l o o k i n g   c l o s e r

  <  back

respond to the review

Starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise, Wentworth Miller, Jacinda Barrett, Phyllis Newman, Anna Deavere Smith
Miramax Films presents a film directed by Robert Benton. Written by Nicholas Meyer. Based on the novel by Philip Roth. Running time: 106 minutes. Rated R (for language and sexuality/ nudity).

When Robert Benton directed the underrated marvel Nobody’s Fool, he adapted a rich novel into a rewarding drama full of wonderful performances, including one of Paul Newman’s finest.

Turning his attention to Phillip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, Benton faced a far greater challenge. The story is complicated, jumping forward and backward in time. It involves two characters suffering extreme—and extremely different—crises. If I had read the novel before viewing the movie, I would have thought it impossible to translate into an effective screenplay.

But Benton and his screenwriter Nicholas Meyer are up to the challenge. While the film’s frame does groan and creak in its attempt to contain such a complex story, and its actors ask us to accept some rather implausible things about their characters, it all comes together in a flawed, but ultimately rewarding, moviegoing experience.

The cinematography is excellent, but not so showy that it becomes a distraction. Meyer's script admirably distills many varied plotlines into heavy doses of intense and believable dialogue. And thanks to the powerful, complex, and intimate work of Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman (doing some of the best work of their careers here), we are reminded just how shallow and simple most Hollywood melodramas really are. In a time when movies aren’t telling enough good stories, it’s refreshing to see one that tries to encompass a bit too much.

As almost any critic will admit, The Human Stain cannot be discussed without spoiling one of its central surprises. Fortunately, the surprise is not the point of the movie, as it usually is in M. Night Shyamalan’s films or The Crying Game. Even Benton admits that it is not a tragedy if viewers know the "secret" ahead of time. After all, there is much more to the story.

So if you want to see the film and be surprised halfway through, stop reading now, assured that this is a good film by a great filmmaker (albeit one for discerning adults due to some of its frank treatment of sexual matters.)

The Human Stain tells the story of Coleman Silk, a professor who resigns his teaching position in outrage when someone creates a scandal over something he said in class. Silk referred to a couple of students as “spooks,” meaning to describe them as ghosts because they never attend class. The students, African Americans, protest because the term is also a derogatory label for people of their color. Silk defends his integrity, denying any intention of a racist remark. When the stress of the event culminates in his wife’s fatal heart attack, he is left in the ruins of a spoiled career and a devastated heart.

Soon after, he meets Faunia, a beautiful but deeply troubled woman working as a janitor. Throwing caution and reputations to the wind, they begin an ill-advised, torrid affair, plunging right into hasty sex. The sex is a bad idea, of course—she’s young enough to be his daughter, and he’s old enough to know better. But they are both so needy, so hungry for compassion and understanding, that they knowingly proceed, happy for the company and the compliment of each others’ offered intimacy.

What happens next is the central issue of the film: The two get past their initial and rash sexual liaisons to discover in each other a recognition, appreciation, and respect for each others’ tormented histories. Premature sex is seen as merely an awkward and misdirected choice, something that fails to provide real healing. Only in the budding intimacy of their hearts do they catch a glimpse of redemption.

Do the stories of Silk and Faunia have anything to do with each other? Absolutely. They both feel cut off from the rest of the world because of the things they have suffered and the sins they have committed. They seem unable to work their way into favor, contentment, or success. They have both been striving for redemption in faulty ways. But they can still find what they are looking for, in recognizing each other's brokenness and loving each other anyway. Thus, through love, grace enters, and they find a fragile peace that, in this world, is surely not going to last long.

We the viewers have, by this point, already been treated to their back-stories through the narrative device of a novelist named Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), who befriends Silk and hears him out as he relates the story of his life. Silk is, as a matter of fact, an African American in disguise as a white upper-class intellectual.

That’s right, Coleman Silk is black. He is a light-skinned black, pale enough to "pass" as Caucasian. Unable to earn the respect and status he desires as a black man, he has chosen to go this route, breaking his mother's heart and alienating himself from his family and his heritage.

Similarly, Faunia has broken away from her own painful past, leaving behind a violent and unstable husband (Ed Harris, in a small but riveting performance) and, even further back, the misery of sexual abuse by her father.

Thus, The Human Stain is ultimately about the wounds that make us who we are, the need we have for compassion and understanding, and the way in which redemption comes through grace, undeserved love, and something far more profound than sex, intellectual achievement, or financial status.

The story, put under the additional pressure of being a convincing visual experience compressed into two hours, creaks and groans and strains like a ship about to come apart in a storm of conflicting emotions, issues, and implausible leaps. But it holds together, thanks to the efforts of a cast who pour themselves into it with the earnestness and intensity of … well… a crew trying to get a ship through stormy waters. It also works thanks to Meyer’s admirably abbreviated adaptation.

Many critics are making a big fuss over Hopkins being “miscast.” They show their own ignorance in doing so. There are African American men who “pass” convincingly as white. No, Hopkins doesn’t look at all like a black man. He isn't supposed to. That’s the point.

Benton quietly underscores his point and defends himself against critical accusations by casting a light-skinned black actor in the role of a white man who makes racist remarks to a black steward on a train. Viewers do not even blink when they see him—they never for a moment realize the actor is actually black.

Thus, Hopkins is excused. He is also extraordinary, breaking free of the Hannibal Lecter stigma that has haunted him for a decade, making Silk both fierce and gentle.

What is much harder to defend is Benton's choice of casting Wentworth Miller as the younger Coleman Silk. There's nothing wrong with Miller--he acquits himself impressively as a fine actor. He powerfully portrays the emotional strain upon his character as he yearns for status, for romance with beautiful white women, for respect as a young black man. But he just doesn’t look anything like Hopkins. This becomes something of a distraction. It is up to each viewer to decide whether he or she will let this ruin the film for them. I hope they choose to accept it. The film has too many other rewards worth enjoying.

Others have complained that Nicole Kidman is "too sexy" to play a poor janitor. True, there aren't many janitors who look like Nicole. But Kidman is such a great actress that she is able to convince us she has lived Faunia’s life, that she bears Faunia’s scars, that she is as dangerous and seductive and foolish as Faunia is. What is more, I’ve seen janitors who seemed beautiful enough to work as models, and I’ve met plenty of models who look, and dress, like janitors. It is a rare thing, yes, but hardly implausible.

Some conservative critics are raising a ruckus over the nudity on display in the film. Yes, the movie might have worked without the couple of scenes that reveal the unclad forms of lovers. But this is not, as has been printed in a few places, "pornography." The camera does not zoom in to exploit the lovers in their nakedness. In fact, it stays back a respectable distance so that we are watching a scene--an event between characters that affects and changes them, a chapter that reveals subtleties about the way they interact. Jean-Yves Escoffier's cinematography is all about intimacy, not exploitation, and you’d be hard pressed to find a film this year that captures more wonderfully convincing, heartfelt exchanges between characters than some of the moments he captures here.

Rhyming well with Escoffier’s imagery is Rachel Portman's score: subdued but highly emotional. Yet it’s not so intrusive or trite that you notice it much. In fact, it dissolved in my mind as I left the theatre so I could not hum a single bar. That’s an effective soundtrack. It should enhance, not overwhelm or manipulate.

And nobody is complaining about the movie’s most spectacular risk and most joyous surprise. I would have laughed out loud if you had told me that the movie included an extended scene in which the retired professor and the skeptical novelist suddenly stand up and start dancing. Yes, Anthony Hopkins convinces Gary Sinise to dance with him. It happens. It fills a surprising amount of screen time. And it works. In fact, it’s such a delight that the audience I was with burst into spontaneous applause.

Somehow, in spite of its overly ambitious agenda, Benton’s film succeeds as a work of art, calling us to explore questions about how intensely we would compromise ourselves to get what we want, about the way we judge others by their appearance, about the ways in which we find healing and wholeness through love and compassion.

No, the film is not a complete success. But it’s probably as close to a success as it could have been. I, for one, am glad they made the effort, for all of the particular and profound moments between characters delivered in gentle intimacy. While the romance of Silk and Faunia is an immature endeavor at first, after they have hastily engaged in a marriage of their outer shells, they later learn that they can open themselves up truly, in an hour of deepest crisis, when all avenues of escape appear lost to them. Sex, divorced from sincerity, love, and commitment, has failed them. Love has saved them…and just in the nick of time.

Where other recent melodramas (Mystic River, 21 Grams) have been humorless, morose, and contrived, Stain is good-humored, warm, and glimmering with hope. Roth is honest about the consequences of wrongdoing, and yet he coaxes us toward compassion rather than judgment. Benton’s refusal to distill Roth’s prose into sappy platitudes leads to a remarkably resonant conclusion for one of this year’s finest films.

Jeffrey's Rating: A-
Click here for an explanation of ratings.