Robert Benton (2003)
This adaptation of the Philip Roth novel is so uncertain and misshapen that you feel Robert Benton and Nicholas Meyer, who did the screenplay, must have been trying for something ambitiously complex in order for it to go this wrong. Benton’s most successful films – in terms of box office and Oscars (and probably critical praise too) – have been Kramer vs Kramer and Places in the Heart: with both of those, he was nearly shamelessly manipulative. It’s no doubt a mark of how much he admires Roth that Benton is so relatively tentative here but the result is miserable, and not because of the original’s tragic themes. Benton’s approach seems fundamentally divided: he wants to honour a major piece of literature but he can’t clear his head of what he sees as the imperatives for making a popular film drama. (The unsubtle music by Rachel Portman seems designed to reassure the audience they’re watching something generic.) Those imperatives mean that the love affair between Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) and Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) is central from the very start: the picture begins with the car crash that kills them both and goes into flashback from there. (It’s true that the affair, between the septuagenarian Coleman and the thirty-something Faunia, is introduced on the first page of the novel but it’s in a very different register.) Coleman Silk’s stellar academic career ends when he refers to two absentee students, because of their continuing invisibility in his classes, as ‘spooks’ (they happen to be black) – and it’s also de rigueur in Hollywood drama for a morally wronged protagonist to be explicitly vindicated. Coleman’s politically hyper-correct nemesis Delphine Roux (Mimi Kuzyk) isn’t a significant character in the film but we get a scene, at Coleman’s funeral, when another former colleague publicly reproaches himself for not speaking up to defend Coleman against Roux and the others who brought a discipline case against him. It’s only after paying his dues to the audience that Benton gets to the heart of the novel: how and why Coleman Silk, a light-skinned black man, successfully pretended to be white and Jewish in order to realise his social and intellectual potential, and disowned his family in the process.
If Benton had revealed more of that at an earlier stage, the funeral address would have been more powerful because we would have developed very mixed feelings about Coleman – and this isn’t the only instance of the director opting for the falsely (and weakly) conventional at the expense of dramatic tension. As a young man (played by Wentworth Miller), Coleman wants to join the US air force: we see him going through the final stages of the enrolment procedure – an official asks Coleman for the card on which he’s been required to enter his personal details. The camera shows the card in close-up: Coleman hasn’t filled in the race section – he hesitates before putting a cross against ‘White’ and handing it over. Judged realistically, the hesitation goes on for an improbably long time – long enough for the official to get suspicious. What’s more frustrating is that, if Coleman had marked his card promptly and decisively, Benton and Nicholas Meyer could have then put in some formal small talk from the official while we experienced Coleman’s absorbing the magnitude of what he’d done. As it is, Wentworth Miller is given hardly any chance to do that before Coleman is told ‘Congratulations: you’re in the air force’. Even when a scene does work in the film, it works largely in isolation from anything else – like the sequence where the young Coleman, a highly talented boxer, shows his girlfriend Steena Paulsson (Jacinda Barrett) how to throw punches, or when the older Coleman dances to ‘Cheek To Cheek’ and insists that the story’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) join him. The dance goes on too long but the scene has an emotional movement and richness. It’s as if Benton, once he started to shape the final cut, realised how little of it was successful and decided to keep in the good bits even if they didn’t connect much with anything else.
Trying to adapt this long (360 pages) and complex novel for the screen was a brave enterprise in the first place: I was sorry that Benton and Meyer then seemed to lose the courage of their convictions. For the most part, the film is so lacking in momentum that it comes over as a series of reconstructions of scenes from Roth. Occasionally, The Human Stain is clumsily rushed, the filmmakers seemingly anxious that the audience will get bored. The fulminating Coleman comes home to tell his wife Iris (Phyllis Newman) that he’s resigned his post as dean of humanities (sic!) and professor of classics over the ‘spooks’ affair; outraged and distressed for her husband, Iris instantly has a stroke and dies a few hours later. (In the novel, the stroke occurs during what we understand to be a long-running battle between Coleman and the college authorities over charges of racism.) And the lecture in which Coleman makes his ironically fateful remark is the first and only classroom performance we see from him. Benton would have done better to give us more of Coleman at work – so that the contrast between the man in his professional prime and in enforced retirement was sharper. Anthony Hopkins is particularly good in the few bits we see of him on campus: actors playing lecturers sometimes give the impression that they think lecturing is an undemanding form of acting – performing to an audience without a script – but that’s not the case with Hopkins. He gives you a sense both of Coleman’s thinking behind some of what he’s saying, and of his knowing other lines by heart because he’s spoken them often before.
Hopkins’s portrait is an honourable try and he has some fine moments but he isn’t able to express the particularities of Coleman’s regret – that he’s nearing death, that he’s lost his wife of many years, that he’s lived a lie – or dramatise their interaction. Of course, it’s terribly difficult for an actor to do something like this without the aid of internal monologue to tell us what his character is thinking but the seventy-one-year-old Coleman’s situation, although it taps larger themes, is so distinctive that the vagueness of Hopkins’s noble sadness is disappointing. There isn’t much spiritual connection or continuity between Hopkins and Wentworth Miller – although when Hopkins does evoke the younger man it’s poignant: the older Coleman’s diffidence in the early stages of his courtship of Faunia Farley resonates with qualities in his younger self. Wentworth Miller, who, especially when he smiles, looks like David Miliband (which added to the sadness of seeing the film this autumn), has an arresting and ambiguous reserve: it’s hard to see where his mannerly quiet ends and his controlling egocentricity begins. (He’s almost sinister in the sequence in which Coleman, fully clothed, watches Steena strip naked for him.) The biggest problem for Anthony Hopkins is Nicole Kidman, as Faunia. You’re in doubt watching her here how capable an actress she is but Kidman comes across even more strongly as a highly competitive performer who’s highly aware of the camera. As a result, you can see her trying to get the upper hand on whomever she’s playing a scene with – and she’s alienating: you can’t understand why Coleman is infatuated with Faunia. We’re told that Faunia, who does menial jobs, came from an affluent family: Kidman affects trailer-trash mannerisms that don’t ring true for someone who, like Coleman, has spent the best part of her life denying her roots. She does her best acting in a scene with a crow that Faunia feels a kinship with: Kidman evidently thinks there’s no competition there (although the bird’s blackness – and lack of self-consciousness! – make it compelling to watch).
Ed Harris is good as Faunia’s ex-husband Lester, a mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran: Harris is as menacing in his quieter moments as when he goes violently loco. And Gary Sinise does well in the (on screen) thankless part of the writer-narrator Zuckerman (the events of the story clear his writer’s block) – although the final scene between him and Lester is poorly staged and anti-climactic. Benton’s direction of the actors is surprisingly patchy. There’s a wooden bit of scene-setting when Zuckerman (a colleague of Silk’s at the college before they become friends outside it) and two other academics discuss the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that’s dominating the news in the summer of 1998; and the timing is repeatedly off in the tensions-within-the-family sequence at the Silks’ dinner table. Jacinda Barrett gives a mostly charming, emotionally nuanced performance as Steena, the Danish-Icelandic girlfriend, but, in the scene when Coleman takes her home to meet his mother and Steena can’t cope (she assumed the black woman who opened the door was the maid), the rhythms of Barrett’s speech, as she chatters desperately over tea with Mrs Silk, aren’t quite right. Anna Deavere Smith, as Coleman’s mother (a nurse), projects the wrong kind of intelligence – she’s too knowing and gallant. On the whole, Benton treats Coleman’s family too reverently (it’s a form of inverse racial discrimination): it’s all the odder, especially given what’s wrong with the playing of the mother, that he doesn’t allow the father (Harry Lennix) to illustrate his love of words, and the precise use of words which Coleman, as an old man, claims to have inherited. The scene in which Silk senior dies at work, as a waiter on a train, is confusing: Lennix looks twenty years younger than when we watched him lay down the law at the family table.
14 October 2010
