It sounded like such a good idea: a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman and Gary Sinise, and helmed by Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning director behind such intelligent, sensitive films as Kramer vs. Kramer and Billy Bathgate. Yet, the characters in the erstwhile drama The Human Stain never command much attention, and a movie with so much potential falls flat on its face.
Stain tells the story of Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), a classics professor at the fictional New England university Athena College. Unjustly accused of racism, Silk is fired, and soon thereafter, his wife dies of a brain aneurysm. In his quickly spiraling downfall, Silk meets writer Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) and janitor Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman). When Silk begins an affair with Farley, he is stalked and threatened by Farley's ex-husband Lester (Ed Harris in the one redeemable role in the film).
Up to now, I had thought it impossible to miscast terrific actors. Miscasting Robert DeNiro? Forget about it. Throwing Daniel Day-Lewis a curveball? Impossible. Meryl Streep unable to inhabit a character? Yeah right. Here I was thinking that miscasting Nicole Kidman was as impossible as… well, miscasting Anthony Hopkins. Yet both are used to surprisingly little effect in Stain.
Face the facts: Kidman's complexion is just a little too perfect, her smile just a bit too radiant and her obvious intelligence just a little too strong to make her believable as the battered wife of a psychopath. And Hopkins? He's just a little too wrong in every way for the part of Silk. The startling revelation about his past that is meant to carry so much weight in this film had far more impact in the book by Philip Roth, on which the movie is based. Here, the revelation makes as little impact as the characters that it concerns.
Harris alone was correctly cast. A bitter, mentally twisted Vietnam-veteran, Lester is the sort of psychopath who hints at more than a few layers beneath his raging exterior (remind anyone of a certain cannibal who was so exquisitely cast back in 1991?).
Benton directs Stain with the technical mastery one would expect after a career of 28 movies, but he seems to be as uninspired by the tale he has created as his cast.
The Human Stain involves so much squandered potential that it's a frustrating spectacle to behold. How could such a good film go so wrong? Don't ask the cast; who can tell if any of them even know which movie it is they are inhabiting?
John Visclosky. John Visclosky is, suffice it to say, "hardly the sharpest intellectual tool in the shed," which is why he has stupidly chosen to here address himself in the third person. He's a mellow sort of guy who enjoys movies and sharing his feelings and innermost … More »
Spot on. Lesson for me: Never watch a movie adaptation before reading the book. Roth is a master, this movie a mess-that detracts from the novel.
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