The Human Stain

The Human Stain (2003) directed by Robert Benton is based on Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. We have Anthony Hopkins as the elderly college professor Coleman Silk – a man who carries around a pretty dark past and who has led most of his life based on a whopping big lie. We have Nicole Kidman, playing Faunia Farley, a woman in her thirties who several reviewers have described as leading a white trash existence… Frankly I think that is a pretty stupid characterisation. We have Gary Sinese, playing Nathan Zuckerman – Coleman’s friend and the narrative voice. We also have Ed Harris in the role of Lester Farley – Faunia’s ex-husband, a Vietnam veteran with some bad habits, a couple of tours of duty and a few madhouses behind him as well as a grudge. Young Coleman is played by Wentworth Miller, who does a good job and gets to wear the nicest suits.

Looking at the cast, the script, the original material and the time, money and effort I can’t help thinking this should be a better movie than it is. Stellar performance by Hopkins, as always. He plays the distinguished college professor of Classical literature who is shown at the very beginning giving a lecture on Achilles, the man who could not give up the girl, and then acts out that same tragedy without being all over the place. I think some of the choices he makes are very clever indeed, showing the emotional restrain of a man who has had to live a life of hiding his true identity and not act on his first impulse at every given moment. Kidman is nothing but emotion, which can get a little tiresome frankly. The ridiculously named character Faunia Farley talks to crows, thrashes kitchens and keeps the ashes of her two children in gold-coloured boxes under her Spartan bed. She swears like a sailor and works three jobs, all manual labour, claiming to have been brought up in a very wealthy home. As a sultry femme fatale she does a pretty good job, but I would have preferred a little more depth and a little less emoting wildly all over the place. Ed Harris is good at being the scary guy. It’s just a matter of walking on for him, with a face like that. Gary Sinese has the dubious pleasure of being the story teller, a writer living as a recluse in a cabin in the woods, telling other peoples stories rather than his own. There are moments of warmth and humor between Zucherman and Coleman that really add to this story, but then there is the rather thin voice over narrative that I feel is neither needed or particularily interesting.

Sidetrack: A bad voice over is always worse than risking a little confusion on the viewer’s part. We’ve got functional voice overs – I think this one falls in that category. But there are voice overs that add and deepen the story – Terrence Malick does that best, even if it sometimes just makes people angry. There are voice overs that just set the scene and then leave the viewer alone for the most part – like The Crow (1994). And when it doesn’t work we have the much debated voice of Deckard in Blade Runner (1982) which was taken out for the director’s cut version. It’s a good example of what happens when studio heads think the audience needs help – and that fake Noir never really worked for some reason. Wether it is diegetic or not, the voice over is clearly a breach of the fourth wall and that makes it extremely tricky to pull of. You have to understand who you are speaking to and try not to insult their intelligence.

Second sidetrack: Writers have a tendency to stick writers in their plot. Just working with what they know, I guess. It takes a special kind of talent to make an author interesting, we are basically dealing with a character who sits around observing events and then turning that into words on a page. Solitary exercises, typically done in a corner sitting on your arse. It can be done well, but that generally involves authors like Oscar Wilde, Shakespear, de Sade, Rimbaud or something like The Basketball Diaries (1995) or Naked Lunch (1991).

But I digress.

Coleman and Faunia have an affair, for lack of a better word, which is frowned upon by people around Coleman. Faunia seems to have no other human relationships, living in a void she herself has created. Coleman and Faunia have one thing in common – they can’t seem to get past their past. I don’t really respond well to Faunia’s stark hurt, thinking she should have learned to subdue some of the rawness of her pain because no one can burn like that all the time and not burn out. Coleman, on the other hand, reveals his secret towards the end of the film, and this is almost treated as an en passant, which I think is kind of odd. His whole life has been about hiding this lie and now it’s like “oh? really? let’s have some coffee…” And without spoling too much I can say that the deaths of the main characters is treated in a similar manner.

Main themes of this story are all deeply interesting things: racial concerns, mind/body dichotomies, youth/age, “action is the enemy of thought” as a basic premise of how to live you life, lies, past hurt, betrayal, friendship, love and so on and so forth. Maybe one of the reasons I keep feeling it could have been better, deeper, richer, darker and more subtle is because it tries to do all these things all at once. And that usually means you have to stay on the surface and just keep moving forward. The literary connotations are buried pretty deep, despite the closet reader being able to churn out some of the classical themes of Achilles and the siege of Troy and his well sung rage.

We are left with a film that focuses on the actor’s performances, which are all good, at the expense of the story. It’s well worth watching none the less and there’s food for thought, but over all I find it somewhat lacking in depth. It has the potential to be more than it is.

Mule