Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a classics professor fired from his job for innocently using the racially offensive word “spooks” in class. Silk’s rise and fall would not be out of place in a Greek tragedy, though his story is quintessentially American. He’s a man who has lived with a great secret (which I am about to give away, so be warned). He’s a black man who’s chosen to “pass” as a Jew, rejecting the “we” of racial identity for the “I” of personal fulfillment. It proves a fateful choice, for both good and ill. In the course of this tale he will lose his job, his wife and his family. He’ll also, at 71, undergo a late, Viagra-assisted flowering of love with a battle-scarred 34-year-old (Nicole Kidman) whose own journey is almost as bizarre as his own.
Roth’s novel doesn’t naturally lend itself to movie form. Benton’s film is ungainly and overstuffed–not to mention miscast. Though the brooding, charismatic Hopkins mesmerizes, he’s not convincingly American or racially ambiguous, and he doesn’t mesh with Wentworth Miller, who plays Silk as a young man. Kidman again demonstrates her versatility and gutsiness, but her beauty is a distraction. I felt I was watching a movie star slumming. Still, for all its shortcomings, “The Human Stain” is an honorable, sometimes moving attempt, better at evoking the poignancy of Silk’s autumnal affair than exploring the moral ambiguities of his deception. No surprise there: love and lust tend to be more movie-friendly subjects than meditations on the divided American soul.
