That Hopkins and Kidman are miscast is almost axiomatic. Kidman tries to overcome this by sheer force of will, struggling to stifle her natural radiance, blunt her crystalline voice and blur her fine features, and she comes closer to succeeding than you might expect. Hopkins, for his part, must battle a more glaring discrepancy, and he does so with swinging nonchalance. Coleman Silk is a black man who has passed for white for most of his adult life, styling himself as the first Jewish classicist ever hired at Athena.
The versatile Hopkins has played improbable roles like Richard M. Nixon and Pablo Picasso. But Coleman Silk seems like a stretch even for him. The absurdity is compounded by the casting of Wentworth Miller, a fine young British-born actor making his film debut, as the younger Coleman. Miller looks nothing like either Hopkins or most of the members of Coleman's family, played by Anna Deavere Smith, Harry Lennix, Lizan Mitchell and Danny Blanco Hall. When he sits down to dinner with them, you may find yourself struggling to suppress the memory of Steve Martin at the beginning of The Jerk.
These peculiarities of casting matter less than they might; or rather how much they matter changes from scene to scene. The film includes some sex, a boxing match and an occasional burst of dancing, but most of the action consists of two characters in a room talking. Some of these moments -- a late confrontation between Lester and Zuckerman, a breakfast table quarrel between Faunia and Coleman, a meeting of the minds between Faunia and a large, caged crow -- are awkwardly paced and placed, but many others are alive with human pain and heat.
Some of the best performances are in secondary roles. Jacinda Barrett is wonderfully touching as Coleman's first great love, a blond Midwesterner to whom he decides, heedlessly and a little cruelly, to divulge the secret of his race. Smith, her face a mask of maternal stoicism, brings home the tragedy of Coleman's decision to pass for white with a speech so drily and evenly enunciated that its lacerating insight only registers once the camera has turned away.
At its best -- which also tends to be at its quietest -- The Human Stain allows you both to care about its characters and to think about the larger issues that their lives represent. Its deepest flaw is an inability to link those moments of empathy and insight into a continuous drama, to suggest that the characters' lives keep going when they are not on screen. The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.
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