When films present the problems of ordinary people, we expect to learn how they could have avoided their plight. The Human Stain, directed by Robert Benton, is very insightful about how those problems emerge but suggests that nothing often can be done to avoid life's train wrecks. The story is told by Nathan Zuckerman (played by Gary Sinise), a novelist who provides voiceovers before, during, and after the film; the film is based on the novel of the same title, published in 2000. Zuckerman, holed up in a mountain cabin, has been unable to write anything for five years; one night, a knock sounds at his door. The visitor is Professor Coleman Silk (played by Anthony Hopkins), who says that he has arrived to relieve Zuckerman's writer's block with a fascinating story. In 1998, in the midst of the sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton, Silk has just resigned before being fired at an upper New England college for offending two African American students by calling them "spooks" because they never attended his lectures; he did not know that they were African Americans, a reasonable defense against the charge, but he resigns because faculty gang up against him at a hearing, thus alienating him from an institution where he taught with distinction for some thirty-five years. Soon, his wife, mortified over the experience, has a heart attack and dies in his arms. He then tries to write a novel about his experiences, but he is unable to do so, so now he believes that Zuckerman will succeed in telling his life story. The biography, however, is at two levels--flashbacks to his younger years and a love affair that Silk carries on after his wife's death. The earlier period is more interesting, recounting experiences in the 1940s, similar to some of those in the 1950s portrayed in Far from Heaven (2001). Silk, whose skin color is white, had African American parents and lived in East Orange, New Jersey. One day his white high school sweetheart, one of the janitors at the college, proclaims her love in such a manner that young Silk (played by Wentworth Miller) takes her to visit his mother (played by Anna Deveare). Rather than revealing that she is shocked by the fact that her boyfriend has an African American mother, she chatters nervously through a meal, but afterward, on a train bound for New York, she says that she cannot go through with marriage. Silk then enlists in the Navy to serve his country in World War II. On the enlistment form he checks that he is Caucasian. For the rest of his life, he is in denial about his African American heritage; instead, he pretends to be Jewish. He does not tell the truth to anyone, including the faculty at the college, though he might have been exonerated if he had done so. The only person in whom he confides is the novelist. Meanwhile, after his wife's death, he carries on an affair with a college janitor, Faunia Farley (played by Nicole Kidman), who is on the rebound from a failed marriage with Lester Farley (played by Ed Harris), whom she says was cruel and violent toward her. Silk comforts her, and she consents to be his girlfriend. Sex scenes and conversations indicate that she wants that comfort to be physical as well as mental. However, her erstwhile husband is furious that his wife is having an affair with another man. One day, Lester decides to play chicken as his truck approaches a car driven by Silk with Faunia as a passenger; although Lester is cleared of the charge of murder because he tells nothing during police interrogation to implicate himself, that is not the end of the story. Zuckerman cannot finish his novel, which he calls "The Human Stain," until he finds Lester Farley for an interview to provide details about his demeanor and personality, which seem anything but violent and cruel as he engages in ice fishing. The interview demonstrates the common thread of the story--that humans are often unfathomable until we peer into the closets into which they retreat due to sanctimonious moralists, where we learn the lies that haunt them throughout their lives. MH

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The Human Stain
by Philip Roth

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.