Review of The Human Stain

POSSIBLE SPOILERS! I did not read the book, but from what I have read around it is a complex story, with deep characters and a lot of reasoning and verbage explaining them. The film does not seem to make a good service to the book, and no good cinema matches what may be a good reading. Still, the premises are quite promising, although too extraordinary to be believable. We are in the end-of-century US, and America starts to live its transition from a liberal thinking to a dominantly moralist society. The main character is a well-known Jewish professor of classic literature, who loses his career on unfounded racism accusations. Soon, we find that the three main characters are each doomed by personal tragedies - the professor by the dark secret of his origin, his much younger lover by child abuse, family abuse and the death of her children, her ex-husband is a traumatized Vietnam veteran. Too many tragedies translate in too little good quality screen time, and what works in a complex book does not work on the screen. What must have been good writing in a novel translates into too many words declaimed on screen, rather than in authentic cinema language. Wonderful actors as Hopkins and Kidman are look as mis-cast and their presumed chemistry never makes it to the viewer. It's still a better than average production, but never raises much above soap opera. 6 out of 10 on my personal scale.