Vital ideas are lost in the translation

Of all the novels to jump into the cultural fray in recent years few seem as unsuited to a Hollywood makeover as Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain.� Published in 2000, this convulsion of fury, literary ambition and aggressively impolite thinking pivots on five bodies set into violent motion against a large, cumbersome and unmistakably American canvas. Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page.

But big ideas don’t always size down for movie screens. That’s especially true in this country, where movies thrive on action, not reflection, and usually go gaga when faced with deep thoughts, especially when the thinker is a pugilist with an open contempt for social hypocrisy. Set in the late 1990s, after a decade of academic culture wars and around the time President Clinton’s cigar follies became a spectacle, Roth’s novel is a pointed piece of its pointed moment. From the start, he comes out swinging against secrets and lies and what he calls the “ecstasy of sanctimony� in a country bingeing on piety and purity. Unlike director Robert Benton and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer in their adaptation of his book, he doesn’t bother with nice.

Classics professor Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins in the film) loses his post as president of a boutique Northeastern college after calling two habitually absent students “spooks.� The students, who happen to be black, file a complaint with the school against Silk. In short order, the professor loses his composure, along with his wife and job, then tries to enlist a reclusive novelist, Roth’s frequent fictional double Nathan Zuckerman (a very un-Roth-like Gary Sinise), to come to his aid by writing about the debacle. The men strike up a friendship, and shortly thereafter Coleman reveals that he has taken up with one of the college janitors, Faunia (Nicole Kidman), a coarse, carnal, brutalized soul who when not scrubbing toilets works at the post office and milks cows at a dairy farm, where she also lives.

If at this point your faith in the film has started to weaken at the image of Kidman, an actress of many gifts but little visible coarseness, playing a toilet-scrubbing, udder-squeezing, bed-rocking townie, it gets better -- or worse, depending on your view. Rather quickly we discover that Coleman, after living the last 50 years as a Jew, is actually a light-skinned black non-Semite. Born and raised in East Orange, N.J., to a middle-class family who aimed him toward Howard University, Coleman had, as one of the characters in the novel explains, decided to skip the civil rights movement. Instead, he had embraced his human rights -- at least his version of those rights -- by shucking off the identity proscribed him at birth. At which point you may wonder: Anthony Hopkins?

Acting always involves a mutual adherence to the art of lying. Actors lie to please audiences and we in turn pretend that we don’t see the man behind the curtain, the star behind the deceit. Still, even great liars falter when pushed beyond their capacities. A versatile performer like Kidman can persuade us that she is a 19th century courtesan and a 20th century novelist with a nose as large as a pickle, because neither role tramples the boundaries of our credulity. But there is something too delicate and refined about her to convey Faunia’s rough hurt, and there’s too much calculation in the way she performs “pain.� Kidman bares almost as much skin in this film as she did in “Eyes Wide Shut,� but never once does she strip down to the emotional nitty-gritty.

Hopkins is trickier to write about because even if he were wearing a striemel and a foot-long beard, I would find it tough to believe him Jewish, much less black. There’s no question that casting across racial and ethnic lines is rife with difficulties, since it tends to pit artistic license (and, of course, business considerations) against minority representation, and there are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides of the divide.

Still, although Hollywood has wised up since Natalie Wood played a Puerto Rican in “West Side Story,� one area in which it seems content to partake in old-fashioned minstrelsy is with Jewish characters. In the case of this film, the problem isn’t that Hopkins is not literally Jewish or black but that he plays Coleman without a suggestion of either identity.

Roth’s book turns on the modern riddle of identity -- its fluidity, its comforts and its curse. As a white Jew, Coleman doesn’t just wear two masks; as far as the world knows, he is those masks. But Hopkins, his British accent flimsily explained away, wears no discernible mask in “The Human Stain.� He fails to register as a man who occasionally lets his facade slip, consciously or not, and has begun to show the strain of so many false fronts, of living a lie. Not that the actor seems to have had any choice, since Benton and Mayer have gutted the novel’s uncivil, discomforting viscera -- including Roth’s pokes at political correctness -- and delivered an uninteresting, at times comically inappropriate “tasteful� story about old guy popping Viagra to get it on with the local hottie.

Shot in dark, moody color by the late Jean Yves Escoffier, that story turns out to be a sporadically involving, nearly meaning-free entertainment. Ed Harris, as Faunia’s violent ex-husband, turns his face into a road map of anguish and bafflement. And Sinise gives his character an intimation of psychological depth, as do Harry Lennix and Anna Deavere Smith in their abbreviated, forceful turns as Coleman’s parents.

There’s real conviction in these performances, which suggests that although the filmmakers were happy to bowdlerize Roth’s novel, they were also trying to hang onto something real. Which makes it all the more baffling that they decided that the way to tackle “The Human Stain� was to strip-mine its ideas and intellectual fury -- to transform a story about an angry black man turned angry white Jew into a loaf of Wonder Bread.

*

‘The Human Stain’

MPAA rating: R, for language and sexuality/nudity

Times guidelines: Adult language, violence, partial female nudity

Anthony Hopkins...Coleman Silk

Nicole Kidman...Faunia Farley

Ed Harris...Lester Farley

Gary Sinise...Nathan Zuckerman

Wentworth Miller...Young Coleman

Miramax Films and Lakeshore Entertainment present a Lakeshore Entertainment/Stone Village production in association with Cinerenta-Cineepsilon, released by Miramax Films. Director Robert Benton. Writer Nicholas Meyer. Based on the novel by Philip Roth. Producers Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi, Scott Steindorff. Director of photography Jean Yves Escoffier. Production designer David Gropman. Editor Christopher Tellefsen. Costume designer Rita Ryack. Music Rachel Portman. Music supervisor Dondi Bastone. Casting Deborah Aquila, Avy Kaufman, Tricia Wood. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

In general release.