2700 words on Nicole Kidman, Robert Benton, and the best film of the century so far: 'The Human Stain'

The Human Stain, the 2003 film directed by three-time Academy Award winner Robert Benton, based on the 2000 novel written by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, is something I watched voluntarily this weekend, despite having heard for twenty years that 1. the work of Philip Roth is unfilmable and 2. this one in particular is really, really bad. But I felt that ~my brand~ could not continue having not seen the Anthony Hopkins/Nicole Kidman collaboration.

There are some bonkers twists in this film that are openly and thoroughly discussed in this piece, so if you ever plan to view the film/read the novel and wish to remain surprised, then you will, unfortunately for us both, have to enjoy my piercing wit on another topic soon.

The poster graphic has really been burned into my brain from teenage years working at Larkfield Home Video, RIP

I really don’t know where to begin, except, I suppose, with the opening credits, during which Hopkins drives on a wintery road with Kidman asleep on his shoulder. Here we get a line of voiceover which I presume is the opening line of the novel, “this is the story of Coleman Silk, etc.” or something—and the sharp, harsh volume/tone of Gary Sinise’s voice (playing the famous recurring Roth role “Nathan Zuckerman”)¹ quickly and efficiently clued me in that we were already in big trouble. The sound mixers have given up. It was the first demarcation of doom, that only pain and suffering lie beyond. Hopkins then drives off the road, presumably killing them both.

Coleman Silk (Hopkins, who for the first third of the film is so good that I was almost tricked into thinking the film itself is good) is the Dean of a university named something other than Amherst College; he is a legendary Classics professor, whatever that means to you. Part of his legendary status comes from the fact that he was one of the first Jewish Classics professors in the world or something.² While lecturing one day, Coleman inquires about the whereabouts of two students who haven’t been to class all semester, and then suggests that they are invisible, ghosts, and says something like, what, are they spooks?

It turns out both students are Black. Coleman has to go up against an academic tribunal as they investigate and defends himself by explaining he has never laid eyes on the students before, etc. However, the faculty (“All of whom I hired, mind you!” Coleman laments later at Zuck) have no choice but to take disciplinary action. Coleman quits in a huff and comes home and his wife, Iris, gets worked up, too. She begins planning a campaign of goodwill to get his job back when she begins to feel some agita in her chest and dies on the spot. This is the first of two instances in The Human Stain in which Coleman Silk’s words and behaviors cause the untimely death a family member.

Coleman knows the writer Zuckerman, a neighbor, and begins a companionship in earnest after his wife’s death; they dance on the porch to “Cheek to Cheek”—Hopkins leads, twirling Sinise like the prettiest girl at the sock hop and predicting Hopkins’ eventual social media presence, proving Barbadian writer and mystic Neville Goddard’s claim that creating something in fiction will eventually force it to exist in reality. He also starts fucking, in the words of Roger Ebert, a “semi-literate” janitor named, you guessed it, Faunia Farley (Kidman).³

Faunia is a quiet but fiery woman, made hard by the many tragedies that have felled her. Later in the film, we learn Faunia has a pet crow named Prince (?) who lives at the local Audubon Society (?); the other birds despise Prince because he was raised by humans and doesn’t know how to be a bird. Isn’t that low-key heartbreaking? This feeling is why I watch TikToks featuring elderly blind baboons.

“A crow who doesn’t know how to be a crow…” Faunia wistfully suggests while monologuing at the crow, who, chillingly, seems to react like a human, and may or may not be animatronic or magical. Perhaps, we wonder, is this a metaphor? Is Faunia a crow who doesn’t know how to be a crow? Fauna does mean animal… Something to #consider.⁴ The scene is on YouTube and it is, quite frankly, beyond critical comprehension and judgment.

Coleman and Faunia come together because of their deep wells of loneliness, not to mention their innumerable secrets; after Faunia’s estranged, mentally ill husband Lester Farley (Ed Harris) tells Coleman that Faunia let their children die because she was sucking someone off, Faunia explains that the children did die, from a heater falling over, but no cock was involved. They were merely asleep. Faunia keeps her children’s ashes beneath her bed in her under-furnished studio apartment in two small boxes and whips them out at Coleman in a rage that night like “what the fuck else am I supposed to do with them?”

But it’s Coleman’s secret that really takes the film to dizzying new heights. For the duration of the film, there are flashbacks to Coleman’s youth where he is played by Wentworth Miller, who looks nothing like Hopkins and is also visibly and audibly homosexual (Prison Break now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu). Coleman is at the top of his class in high school, and when he gets into NYU (which gets to keep its real name, unlike fictional Amherst) a teacher or someone idk (I had gotten my phone out by this point) advises him to not tell anyone he’s “colored, you’re from East Orange, NJ, everyone will just think you’re Jewish.”

The way I literally did this.

I’ve never locked in quicker and more intensely on anything in my entire life; I was like, wait… did I hear that right? My pulse quickened, breathing shallowed, palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. Does Anthony Hopkins play a Black man in The Human Stain, the 2003 film based on the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel from the year 2000?

My mind began racing to try to resolve the conflicting emotions I was feeling; I began bargaining, looking for excuses: certainty Coleman Silk will be revealed to be mixed race, not fully Black. But no, both of Coleman Silk’s parents are Black. Coleman’s father, who works in the dining car on a train, is raising his children to have everything he didn’t have in life; Coleman is intended to be a medical doctor, though he has no intention of getting into the medical profession. He simply can’t turn away from Achilles and Helen of Troy… (If you were wondering if they ever compare Faunia to Helen of Troy, given that Coleman is a Legendary Jewish Classics professor—the answer is, obviously, they do.)

Coleman’s father finds out that he has been boxing in his spare time and forbids him continue. Later that night, a patron on the train calls him “Boy” and this, combined with the utter humiliation of having a son who flagrantly disregards the effect boxing could have on his hands’ future ability to perform delicate and intricate surgeries, causes Mr. Silk to keel over and die right there on the train. This is the aforementioned second instance of Coleman Silk killing one of the most important people in his life.

There is one good scene in the movie, so let’s get serious for a moment, because it really got me: there’s a flashback toward the end of the film where Young Faggot Genetically Black Coleman Silk goes to see his mother, played by Anna Deavere Smith, the genius performance artist and also Nurse Jackie’s coworker Gloria on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie; he tells her he is getting married to a white woman and he’s never going to tell her he’s Black.⁵ Mrs. Silk realizes that means she will never meet her daughter-in-law or any prospective grandchildren, ironically, wistfully conjuring a scene where “you’ll ask me to meet you at Penn Station at 11:15 one day and you’ll walk by with my grandchildren.” Then she submits that any theoretical grandchildren “may not come out as white as you” and you can see the possibility of ever having children fade from Coleman’s eyes.

Smith carries the scene (though Miller comfortably holds his own—I would like to marry him, by the way) as she has often done in works of abject shit. For just this one instance while watching Robert Benton’s The Human Stain, the sadness of Coleman Silk’s life comes into clear, stirring, tragic focus. “You think like a prisoner,” she tells him. “You’re as white as snow and you think like a slave.” Just when you think, wow, they kind of really nailed that, I can see how the book might actually be as great as people say, maybe this movie has some juice, Faunia returns. Gary Sinise returns. The allegedly Black Anthony Hopkins returns.

Robert Benton’s career as a screenwriter and eventually as an Academy Award-winning director was launched on a lie. Robert Towne, who died a week ago today, wrote the shooting draft Bonnie and Clyde, but Benton got the screen credit for having written the initial draft; Writer’s Guild bylaws make it hard for anyone coming in to do rewrites to get their name on the movie. It’s one of those troubling little things in Hollywood, oh, just “screen credit,” but the industry always knows who really wrote a script. Everyone knows Carrie Fisher actually wrote The Goonies, everyone knows Aaron Sorkin actually wrote The Rock, and everyone knows that Robert Towne actually wrote Bonnie and Clyde.

There is truly no reason for Robert Benton to have had the career he’s had except that in twelve years he was credited on four absolute smash hits, Clyde; What’s Up, Doc?; Superman; and Kramer vs. Kramer, the latter of which he directed and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It is impossible to understate the commercial success of the latter two films, which gave Benton carte blanche for the next thirty years of his career. Let’s not forget that Dustin Hoffman slapped Meryl Streep about the face all the way to Marvel-level box office (one of the poorer performers—Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) and then to five Academy Awards; and Superman made James Cameron money.

So, even though Benton would go on to create more than his fair share of flops from the mid-80s onward, he had already secured his position at the top of the mountain from which he would never fall. Such was the fate of white cishet American men in the latter half of the twentieth century. When the Weinsteins decided they were going to try their hand at The Unfilmable Philip Roth, they thought, why not get the man who made an lighthearted family drama with the theme “sometimes the dad is actually the better parent” that grossed the equivalent of a billion dollars to helm a movie about passing that features an extended sad woman/crow heart-to-heart?

Another such creative and commercial abortion from the illustrious career of Robert Benton is the 1991 period crime thriller Billy Bathgate, Benton’s first collaboration with Nicole Kidman, and her second ever Hollywood credit after Days of Thunder, which served explicitly as her audition to be Mrs. Tom Cruise. By 2003, Kidman’s career was in a completely different place—she was freshly divorced and, suddenly free from the influence of the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center in Franklin Village, doing the most exciting work of any actor of her generation.

In fact, 2003 was the height of Kidman’s success as a prestige theatrical film actress. In March, she won her Oscar for the 2002 film The Hours; in May, she went to Cannes Film Festival with Lars von Trier’s Dogville and first decided to start getting cosmetic surgery when she saw what her face looked like filmed on high definition digital video and projected on the big screen.⁶ And in August, Nicole Kidman went to La Biennale di Venezia with Robert Benton and The Human Stain.

I have often said that Kidman’s work from 1999-2004 is the closest thing to Marlon Brando 1951-1955 that I have had the pleasure of living through.⁷ What Kidman brings to the screen in her best work, within and beyond that peak era, is not just precision as a performer but a total command of the cinematic apparatus, her place within it, and her ability to influence it, much in the same way that Brando did.

This is killing me lol

During this legendary era of screen acting, at the height of her powers, when she was the most in demand actor on the face of the earth, Nicole Kidman chose to work with Robert Benton. For many years, it was been the only movie from that era that I’d not seen. Regrettably, I am unable to say “even though the movie is bad, Nicole is giving.” It pains me to say, she is not giving.

It is perhaps the most miscast I have ever seen Kidman; she is doing her absolute best but she is completely out at sea alone in this film. The balance between hardened working class woman and wounded, fragile dove required by a role such as Faunia Farley, while squarely in Kidman’s wheelhouse—frankly, this is her bread and butter and the role should have been an easy home run—is so severely miscalibrated that her performance is a laughingstock.

Benton clearly gave her no direction; he was probably like, when you case Hopkins and Kidman, you can just let them go! I understand that sentiment. But Kidman is a collaborator, that is the mode in which she thrives. Even an actor as skilled as Nicole Kidman cannot know her place in the cinematic apparatus when the director does not know what that is, neither instinctually nor academically. Kidman does her best work with directors who are as exacting and meticulous as she is, and who have an understanding of the psychological and ideological ramifications of bringing any image to bear in the cinema, such as her favorites Stanley Kubrick, Jane Campion, Gus Van Sant, and “Baz.”

And if I had to go from working with Stanley Kubrick to Robert Benton, I would have let Anthony Hopkins drive me off the road, too.

The way they arere like “it is so good to laugh” as they about to careen off a cliff to their deaths <3

1. I have long pretended to be an authority on Roth, mainly because there aren’t many in my social circles who could possibly disprove me, I have enough material from being a fan of Lena Dunham and also being a sentient enjoyer of culture since the 1990s in the United States of America, but in truth I have only read Portnoy’s Complaint, which is, bar none, the funniest book I have ever read. I would, in fact, say that I did not believe a novel had the capacity to make me actually laugh aloud before I read Portnoy. Perhaps I should read another of Roth’s novels. I own about seven. I do not, unfortunately, own a copy of The Human Stain.

2. Put a pin in this, as it will be of the utmost importance later.

3. I literally just burst out laughing typing out “Faunia Farley.”

4. I have heard the novel is quite great, and this should serve as a reminder that perhaps literary metaphors do not translate in a 1:1 way to visual metaphors. All due respect to Roth and all disrespect to Robert Benton.

5. It really was making me laugh when we see Young Iris, because when we see her in her one two-minute scene that she does not survive at the top of the film, she is but a regular Americana Academia Wife type but in the flashback, she is an absolute smoke show and we see her getting out of a steamy shower. What was Iris Silk’s life like, Robert Benton? There must be something there. Show me to me.

6. Lest anyone think that one is a joke, I have heard that is a true story, which breaks my heart because she appears to the rest of us as luminous and angelic in Dogville.

7. Adam Driver’s career 2012-Ongoing is the only thing even remotely in the same ballpark in my lifetime. Megalopolis Coming Soon to an IMAX Theater near you - September 27, 2024.