Once he decides to pass, Coleman Silk finds it relatively easy to exist as a white Navy officer, college student and professor he must have had problems, but we don't see them. (I am not forgetting that to cross from white to black would be much more difficult, because you'd take on the impact of racism.) What makes "The Human Stain" ambitious and fascinating is how it considers both of these journeys. It was different 50 or 100 years ago, but today most of us find it more difficult to deal in depth with someone of another class than with someone of another race.
You can talk and think just the way you do now. To cross the race line involves deep psychological anguish, as you betray yourself and your past, but in the routine of daily existence it is perhaps easier than crossing the class line. Which is more difficult? Consider that Coleman and Faunia must deal with each other despite their lack of common references, education, background, assumptions, manners of speech, tastes and instincts.
#HUMAN RACE 2 MOVIE MOVIE#
fascism what's harder to believe is the self-abasing apology delivered late in the movie by one of Silk's tormentors.) The story involves two different kinds of passing: crossing the race line, and the class line. (It's tempting to say the response to his slip is exaggerated, but every campus has a story or two about P.C. extremism that cost him his job because of an innocent verbal slip, and asks him to write about it. Eventually there is Faunia, but his talks with her are more confessional with Zuckerman, he expresses his rage at the P.C. Silk must have someone to confide in, and Zuckerman provides a listener. Harris is frighteningly effective as the ex-husband hard to believe this is the same man who plays the kind football coach in " Radio." The movie's narrator is Nathan Zuckerman ( Gary Sinise), a recurring character in Roth's later novels.
Whether Kidman convinces us she is a working-class woman with a wife-beating ex-husband ( Ed Harris) is another hurdle the movie sets for itself. After his resignation, unexpectedly, in middle age, he begins a passionate affair with Faunia Farley ( Nicole Kidman), an unlettered school janitor half his age. (Does Hopkins look as if he "could" have been black? How can you answer that question about a man who successfully passes for white? The racist white man on the train who berates the porter is played by Allison Davis, a Chicago attorney who is black.) Hopkins makes our acceptance easier because he is a fine actor, and involves us so directly in the character's life that we forget about the technical details. We simply have to accept the mismatch as a given, and move on. One problem with "The Human Stain," however, is that Anthony Hopkins doesn't look anything like Wentworth Miller, who plays him as a young man. Many black family trees have branches that drifted over the color line. Passing for white is not as uncommon as some of the reviewers of "The Human Stain" seem to think.
Early in the film, dating a white girl, he takes her home to meet his mother, having not made it clear he is black his revelation is made through the fact of her appearance, which seems cowardly and cruel. There are heartbreaking scenes involving his mother ( Anna Deavere Smith), whom he treats with cool disregard. He decides the choice is clear, enlists in the Navy as a white man, and severs his links with his past. In flashbacks, we see a bright young man, light-skinned enough to pass, who sees two career paths ahead of him, one as a white, the other as a black.
The world thinks Coleman Silk ( Anthony Hopkins) is Jewish.
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