Quote:
| So, no one saw The Human Stain over the weekend? |
There's been more drama over the release of this thing than there is in most films. Before it ever played in a theater, it had already been proclaimed a surefire Oscar contender and then a disaster -- a complete rise-and-fall arc enacted almost entirely in the journalistic arena. The release date was postponed multiple times, the initial opening was cut from 600 to 160 screens, and the lead story in today's NYTimes has Miramax virtually admitting that they'll have a hard time keeping this in theaters through the awards season.
I blame Miramax's marketing division. They've run some effective Oscar campaigns, but they really oversold this one. It's dangerous to position a picture for prestige if you can't be absolutely sure of critical support. They made the same mistake two years ago with
The Shipping News, which had to be hurriedly yanked from theaters.
The Human Stain may suffer the same fate.
It's a shame, because for all its flaws the film is still worth seeing -- IF you can look past certain obvious problems. (Spoilers follow, although they've already been disclosed by dozens of reviews.) Yes, Anthony Hopkins is miscast, and not because he can't play the part. It's one of his most skillful recent performances, but you never get past the fact that it's a performance -- Hopkins enters the scene with way too much baggage to be convincing as a light-skinned African-American who has passed himself off as Jewish for most of his life. (The director, Robert Benton, has said that he hired Hopkins because he thought he would be convincing as a classics professor, but that's one of the least interesting or relevant parts of the character.)
To make matters worse, Hopkins looks nothing like Wentworth Miller, who plays his younger self and has the right look (he's British but is the child of a biracial parents), and Miller, who is excellent, looks nothing like the family members that you see him with in flashback. In a stage play, with minimalist sets and decor, an audience could easily skip past these problems to reach the drama of the situation. But in a film with a naturalistic setting drenched in lovingly created period detail, these are dangerous distractions.
There are similar complaints about Kidman's casting, but I disagree with them. Yes, she's too beautiful for the part she plays, but that's true of most female movie stars. Kidman's still an actress above all, and she does another of her chameleon performances as she disappears into the role of Faunia Farely, a damaged, secretive menial laborer who wears a thin outer shell of hostility (and sexual aggression) to cover the nerves left raw by a life of tragedy, at least some of it self-inflicted.
What's the film about? It's something of a tangle, which is yet another reason why you don't want to distract the audience with bizarre casting choices. Hopkins plays Coleman Silk, who, by a combination of lies and will power, creates a life for himself that he wasn't supposed to have. In his later years, that life is destroyed by an occurrence that, from one point of view, appears random and from another appears to be his buried past coming back to taunt him (Coleman becomes a pariah after being accused of making a racist remark to the college class he teaches). The film is about Coleman's rediscovery of a buried self -- through an affair with Faunia, through friendship with the writer, Zuckerman (expertly played by Gary Sinise), and through memory. Like most things in life, this rediscovery comes at a price.
There are interesting issues scattered across the film, and there are scenes that I found quite affecting. (Ed Harris, as Faunia's ex-husband, is a lot more terrifying than the villains in most movies today -- his conversation with Zuckerman near the end of the film is truly chilling.) But serious drama is a very hard sell in movie theaters today, and when you complicate it with oddball casting, your chances of connecting with an audience drop precipitously.
One thing's for certain: I've got to make time to read the novel.
M.
(out of four); 
in its own genre.
Lew Crippen was also disappointed with Lost In Translation. That makes three regular posters in this indie thread, including myself, in the minority. 
