Based on the book by Phillip Roth, \The Human Stain"" opens with a scene at Athena College in New England in 1998 where Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a professor of the classics.??He finds himself embroiled in controversy after referring to two absent students in one of his classes as ""spooks."" It turns out the two students were black and Silk is charged with racism. He quits in outrage and the final blow occurs when his wife drops dead from an embolism after hearing the news.??
Silk begins a new life and moves to New England.??Once there, he visits Nathan Zukerman (Gary Sinise), a reclusive writer who lives nearby, with the hopes of convincing him to write a book about the incident.??Hopkins tells him, ""Believe me, this thing will read like 'The Manchurian Candidate.'"" The two strike up a friendship and Silk reveals to Zukerman he is having an affair with a 34-year-old woman, Faunia Farely (Nicole Kidman). She is a firecracker who works three jobs, one of which is milking cows.
It is a funny sight to see Kidman playing a hard-luck working woman while she has the high-gloss appearance of a movie star even while doing barn chores and wearing overalls.??Silk and Farely have a passionate love affair that has him singing the praises of Viagra. The problem is that Farely has a tragic past and a loose cannon ex-husband who keeps spoiling the fun.??All of this is interspersed with flashbacks from Silk's life where audiences find out the big secret-that Silk is black and has kept that information from everyone in his life.
The screenplay by Nicholas Meyer keeps the basic elements of the book intact.??The director, Robert Benton, does not seem to have been able to find a way to make all of these elements work. All of the different subplots comment on each other neatly and predictably and it scores easy points about race, which, unfortunately, comes off as heavy-handed and manipulative.
