The Human Stain
(105 mins, 18)
Directed by Robert Benton; starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise

Arguably, the two most remarkable fictional accounts of American life in the years since the Second World War are John Updike's quartet about Pennsylvanian businessman Rabbit Angstrom and Philip Roth's trilogy in which three complex lives of men from Roth's native New Jersey are viewed by his novelist alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.

Neither author has been served well by the cinema. The first of the Angstrom novels, Rabbit Run, was indifferently filmed in 1970, and since then the only Hollywood adaptation of Updike has been the mediocre Witches of Eastwick. Goodbye Columbus, the novella that provided Roth's first collection of tales with its title, was attractively adapted in 1969, but the film of his most famous book, Portnoy's Complaint, was a disaster.

The Human Stain, a version of the final novel in the trilogy that began with American Pastoral and continued with I Married a Communist, is better, and infinitely more serious, than any of these pictures, but still something of a disappointment.

All three novels are stories of defeat. American Pastoral centres on a Jewish high-school sports star who grapples with industrial change and the transformation of moral values and sees his daughter become a victim of the counterculture. The hero of I Married a Communist is an idealistic radio star who falls foul of the McCarthy-era witch-hunt. Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), the protagonist of The Human Stain, is a Jewish classical scholar who has devoted his life to putting a New England college on the academic map, only to be accused of racism in his late sixties.

His offence against political correctness is to refer to two constantly absent students as 'spooks', meaning ghosts. Both turn out to be black and claim he was using a derogatory term. They demand an apology which he refuses to give. Silk receives no support from his academic colleagues so he resigns, an event which brings on his wife's death and pitches him into a mood of vengeful, rancorous despair. A year or so later, in 1998, he meets Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a blocked novelist living a reclusive existence in the Massachusetts countryside and asks him to write his story.

Silk is at the centre of an immense web of history and experience, both private and public, that stretches from the war to President Clinton's second term, from a time of bourgeois prudery to a point when sex in the White House is the constant subject of ribald comment. It's a period that began with blacks (known as Negroes) being discriminated against everywhere to a situation where blacks (now called African Americans) are given deferential treatment.

Silk, the film and novel insist, reflects in his private life the social changes of his time, and he resembles a character in the Greek literature he teaches. Like Clinton, he's entered into a dangerously unsuitable affair with a young woman, Faunia (an unhappily cast Nicole Kidman), of a different class and background - trailer park, she calls it.

She draws him into a con flict with her former husband, a deeply disturbed Vietnam veteran (Ed Harris), which parodically evokes the Trojan war. Of equal significance, it transpires that Silk is a light-skinned black who, in the great American tradition of the reinvention of self, has cut himself off from his family and passed as white since the Forties.

The subject of blacks 'passing' is a fascinating one, and Roth's book might well have been triggered by the remarkable case of Anatole Broyard, the half-black New Orleans-born literary critic of the New York Times, who concealed his origins throughout his life and was the subject of a 1996 New Yorker profile by the black scholar, Henry Gates.

Several Hollywood films have touched somewhat gingerly on the topic, including Lost Boundaries in 1949, and Douglas Sirk's final American movie, Imitation of Life, 10 years later. But it is given a greater depth here, both in the flashbacks, where the young Silk is played by the strikingly handsome Wentworth Miller, and in the tragic weight of Hopkins's performance.

Robert Benton's film is characteristically fastidious and intelligent, yet it seems so much narrower and simpler than the novel. This is partly because there is no way of encompassing Roth's cool observation and partly because the screenwriter, Nicholas Meyer, has greatly reduced the role of the Vietnam veteran, and has virtually abandoned a major character, the frustrated French academic Delphine Roux, who conducts a vindictive campaign against Silk.

The movie might well have benefited from being 40 minutes longer. The Human Stain is much concerned with dying and death, and is dedicated at the end to its cinematographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier, who died while the film was in post-production. It might also have been dedicated to the late Andrew Forge, one of the best British art critics of the twentieth century, who makes a brief appearance in a crucial scene playing one of Silk's academic colleagues.