Perhaps you read Phillip Roth's 2000 novel The Human Stain and thought to yourself, "Hey, this would make for a great movie!" Guess what: You were wrong. Very, very wrong.
The mark of a great movie is its ability to make an audience believe what it is presenting, in spite of what reality and better judgment advise us against. Rhett Butler really didn't give a damn; Robert Duvall really did love the smell of napalm in the morning; that guy in Network really was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. It's all a question of what viewers are going to buy and how persuasively a film can finagle moviegoers to willingly suspend disbelief.
We're not going to spoil The Human Stain by giving away big plot secrets, but hypothetically speaking, would you believe a movie that starred Sir Anthony Hopkins as a black man? If not, you probably won't enjoy this one.
Hypothetically speaking, of course.
The Human Stain is a film that stumbles right out of the gate and lumbers awkwardly and heavily until the end, trampling your intelligence every chance it gets. Hopkins (under)plays Coleman Silk, a college professor who loses his job and wife after being accused of making an in-class racial epithet. Nicole Kidman is grossly miscast as the poor and tormented Faunia Farley, a chain-smoking postal worker/janitor/dairy hand who is still way too good-looking to involve herself with mail, mops or cows. ("She has a perm! She must be poor!") The two cross paths and develop a relationship (read: sleep together a lot) in a comically underdeveloped series of events, and somehow unravel each other's deepest, darkest (no pun intended) secrets.
Adding to the mess that is a Hopkins-Kidman freakfest is the supporting work of Ed Harris and Gary Sinise, who play a Vietnam vet ex-husband and a reclusive author who befriends Silk, respectively. Normally solid additions to any film, these two never truly find a voice and merely float through. The real mortal-wound-miscast, however, has to be that of Hopkins for the aforementioned hypothetical that he may or may not be a black man merely posing as white.
Stain raises plenty of questions--and not in a good way. Why does the young Coleman Silk (played by the stodgy Wentworth Miller) not have a Welsh accent? Why do they look nothing alike? Why are a 71-year-old and a 34-year-old getting it on so much? Is there supposed to be some social commentary here? Are they getting it on again?!
Since the cat is (hypothetically) out of the bag, let's just say it would probably be easier to portray Flava Flav as a white guy. Michael Jackson should have gotten the part. Then maybe insultingly insipid lines like "A crow that doesn't know how to be a crow" (Symbolism so rarely stands on your face and jumps up and down) would seem more inspired. Perhaps all books should not be adapted for the big screen. At least not like this.
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