Robert Benton's adaptation of a Philip Roth novel feels incontrovertibly bookish: the Big Themes (American race relations, moral hypocrisy, political correctness), the vast historical canvas (Vietnam, World War II), the contextual co-ordinates from current affairs (Viagra, Clinton-Lewinsky), the academic setting (mythical Athena College in rural Massachusetts), the self-analytical literary allusions (the Greek Tragedy device of "peripeteia," the amorous dilemma of Achilles: "Give up the girl"), the talk of writers and writing, and, to top it all off, the writerly first-person narration by a professional writer who, it turns out, has indeed written a book about the events in the movie. To be sure, the Dutch Master half-light that Benton favors in cinematography is painterly, not bookish, but still not quite movie-ish: his fussed-over, prinked-up images approach petrifaction. The expository scenes play pretty well, as the professorial protagonist steps on tender toes with his use of the word "spooks" in reference to two absent students whom he has never seen, and who happen to be black. And along the way there are some nice little throwaway moments, such as the voyeuristic, through-the-window views of two certifiably heterosexual men dancing to "Cheek to Cheek." But Benton is not to be content with nice little throwaway moments. The irony of ironies -- the almost Sophoclean irony, if you must -- is that this professor, "one of the first Jews to teach in a Classics department in any college anywhere," is himself black, unbeknownst to anyone in his present life. This racial revelation might work better on the page, which is to say in the mind's eye. It might even have worked all right on screen with someone in the role besides Sir Anthony Hopkins (whose American accent continues to sound a bit betwixt and between). The problem with Hopkins is not just that he cannot pass for black. Nor is the problem merely the usual one, in decades-spanning movies, that we know too well what the actor looked like when he was young, and that he does not remotely match the young man in the flashbacks (Wentworth Miller). The problem, additionally, is that the young man in the flashbacks is so perfectly cast for the part, so plausible as either a Jew or a black, that he spotlights the imperfection and implausibility of Hopkins. With Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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