Despite a plot that builds and finishes like a Michael Crichton
novel, with pieces that never properly coalesce, Robert Benton’s
The Human Stain is a powerful portrayal of the longevity and
complexity of each life–and of how many of those lives one
individual can live.

The story is one of an aging, yet ferocious, classics professor,
Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), who is accused of slurring two
black students (not knowing their race, he called them “spooks”
because they had yet to appear in his class). The charge is
trumped-up by administrators, who do not appreciate the changes he
has made to their small Massachusetts college since he arrived
decades earlier.

The great weight of the injustice sends Coleman home in a
rage–which sends his wife’s heart racing and kills her. Shortly
afterward Coleman visits a novelist, Nathan Zuckerman (Gary
Sinise), and relays to him the film’s repeated karmic theme: His
enemies tried to strike him down and killed his wife instead.

If nothing else, Human Stain immerses its audience in its
characters’ lives so much that it is almost impossible to believe
how much ground each has traversed.

As a result of his ambiguity, Coleman eventually loses both his
fiance and his family. When we encounter him as an old widower,
Coleman has played every role from a black youth to a tenured
professor, to the lover of a self-proclaimed “white-trash” wage
laborer (Faunia mops floors at the college, puts in her time at the
post office and milks cows in the barn where she lives).

She realizes that his sins and his pain may be just as important
as her own and, in a touching moment, the self-loathing janitor and
widowed professor meet on a human level.

Lester, Faunia’s ex-husband (Ed Harris) is the most savage human
in the movie, holding both burning rage and cold righteousness in
his heart. A Vietnam veteran, he rouses sympathy as he stands on a
secluded icy lake before Nathan and explains how he should be
teaching his son how to fish instead of teaching a hack
novelist.

Nathan is a writer and a parasite, documenting humanity for his
own sake–seeking only convenient truths and chiming in with the
others that tell Coleman he should dump Faunia because she’s too
much of a liability.

Sitting on the wind-swept lake, Lester, the man everyone thinks
is insane, probably identifies better with his ex-wife and her
lover than with the benign Nathan. They have all paid for their
sins with the pain of death or solitude, and they have all marked
their ground with their irremovable stain.