Jewish viewers will be tipped off by the character’s mispronunciation of “chutzpah” at the contentious faculty meeting — he begins the word with a benign “h” instead of the guttural “ch” — and wonder if his character is really Jewish
Like a Tiffany snow globe, “The Human Stain” — and its main character — are impeccably put together and implacably inaccessible.
Philip Roth’s novel, adapted by director Robert Benton and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, reaches the screen as a muted tragedy of assimilation.
However, what its central character has lost — or abandoned — is intangible, ephemeral and, in fact, barely discernible. So it follows, as the winter must succeed the fall, that the film is devoid of emotional impact.
“The Human Stain” opens Oct. 31 throughout the Bay Area.
The Jewish intellectual Coleman Silk (the arch Anthony Hopkins) is an esteemed classics professor at an upscale New England college. In the movie’s opening scenes, he resigns his post in a fury when he’s accused of racism.
Jewish viewers will be tipped off by Silk’s mispronunciation of “chutzpah” at the contentious faculty meeting — he begins the word with a benign “h” instead of the guttural “ch” — and wonder if his character is really Jewish. The rest of the audience will catch on 20 minutes later when the screenplay reveals that Silk is, in fact, black.
Silk’s backstory is told in flashbacks that comprise the movie’s most resonant scenes. As a light-skinned high school boxer, he’s advised by his Jewish boxing coach to say nothing about his ethnic identity. He’ll probably be perceived as Jewish, a promoter says with a laugh, and although the movie eventually reveals why Silk decided to pass for white, this throwaway remark is the only hint why he chose to pretend that he was a Jew for his entire adult life.
It’s a dark joke that Roth devised, although the movie certainly finds no humor in it. If a black man wished to blend into mainstream society in the 1950s, why on earth would he choose a Jewish identity? Even in academia, wouldn’t he have an easier ride as a non-Jew?
In the present-day story, Silk falls for a much younger school custodian (Nicole Kidman) who’s also running from her past. The implication is that contemporary American society allows people to bridge the class divide more easily, an interpretation that positions “The Human Stain” as a comedy of manners without the laughs.
More importantly, Silk’s late-in-life affair ignites a recklessness that’s the diametric opposite of the control and calculation he’s brought to bear on the previous 40 years of his life.
Silk’s confidant, and the film’s narrator, is a younger novelist named Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) who is, presumably, an assimilated Jew. It’s hard to imagine two actors less believable as Jewish characters than Hopkins and Sinise, which robs the movie of a crucial verisimilitude.
We watch “The Human Stain” as if it were set in an alternate Hollywood universe, not a recognizable society where real people wrestle with ghosts, ambitions and the truth.
Of course, the casting is meant to underscore that these two men have no connection to Judaism. Nary a word or knickknack points to Zuckerman’s Jewishness, but his name labels him, and so we define him by what’s absent rather than by what’s present.
The problem is that Zuckerman relates the story without a whiff of self-awareness that Silk’s active decision to bury his black identity is not far removed from his own passive choice to glide away from his Jewish identity.
Ultimately, the film’s title can be read as an updating of Shakespeare’s line, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
“Julius Caesar” is a great tragedy. Well acted and impeccably staged as it is, “The Human Stain” is simply a restrained, engaging thriller.
“The Human Stain” opens Oct. 31 throughout the Bay Area.