Robert Benton’s The Human Stain, adapted from the Philip Roth bestseller, should be a lesson to us all: It is possible to make a film creakier than Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. At the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) quits his job at a prestigious, politically correct university after he’s accused of making racist remarks. By “spooks” he meant ghosts, not black people. Or did he?
Soon after his wife dies, Coleman befriends a local writer, Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Senise), and starts dating the much-younger Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman). Together they regurgitate the past, and via hysterical flashback sequences the audience discovers that Coleman is a light-skinned African-American. Perhaps needless to say, a considerably more provocative examination of very similar material is on display throughout Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life.
Except for one off-the-cuff remark about cock-sucking, you’d never know that that Benton’s film was adapted from a Roth novel. Roth’s contemptible but genuinely human protagonists are enigmas wrapped in riddles wrapped in mysteries, walking-talking political paradoxes frustrated by sex and race. Here, Roth’s acid-wit prose is replaced with schematic dialogue that embarrassingly strains to address the novel’s big themes. (This is also the second Oscar season in a row where Kidman shares a tender moment with a bird. As she stares longingly at the black creature, Faunia whispers beneath tears, “A crow that doesn’t know how to be a crow.”)
And whatever humor carries over from Roth’s book is either undercut by the inert visuals or sure to be lost to anyone unfamiliar with the story. “How do you take it?” asks the teenage Coleman (Wentworth Miller), offering a cup of coffee to the nubile white girl who’s slowly falling in love with him. “Black is fine,” she replies. No it ain’t, but he’ll have to wait a few reels to find out. Equally head-thumping are the deliberate mythological contextualizations.
Referred to at one point as Achilles on Viagra, Hopkins’s Coleman isn’t the naturally melodramatic monster that Roth fans may be expecting. Rather than evoke the man’s racial abandonment as a grotesque political nightmare (the Clinton scandal is just background noise here), this mundane production merely settles for misplaced melodrama and cheap sympathy. When the young Coleman’s “father” keels over inside a train car, the last thing someone tells him is: “Boy, this fish is overcooked.” As they say, truer words.
Image/Sound
What went wrong here? The sound is fine, as is everyone’s skin tone, and there’s no evidence of color noise or edge enhancement throughout, but the constantly fluctuating black levels are embarrassing to behold, especially during night sequences. The blacks are so unstable as to suggest the print was run through nuclear waste. But considering the theme of the film, I suppose someone could make the case that this was a deliberate decision on the part of Buena Vista Home Entertainment. Nah.
Extras
The behind-the-scenes special included here is pretty unspectacular, save for some insights by Wentworth Miller, and a mini tribute to deceased director of photography Jean Yves Escoffier feels a wee bit half-assed. Rounding out the disc are trailers for Cold Mountain, The Barbarian Invasions, and People I know.
Overall
You know what they say: Once you go black, you never go back.
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