His quiet life is interrupted by Coleman Silk, a former dean and professor of classics at local Athena College, who was forced to resign after being accused of making a racist remark in class.

The project is placed on the back burner when Coleman has an affair with Faunia Farley, a considerably younger, semi-literate woman who supports herself by working menial jobs, including at the college.

Their relationship is threatened by the faculty members who forced Coleman from his job and by Faunia's ex-husband Lester, a mentally unbalanced Vietnam War veteran who blames her for the deaths of their children in an accident.

The filmmakers explicate Mr. Roth's themes with admirable clarity and care and observe his characters with delicate fondness, but they cannot hope to approximate the brilliance and rapacity of his voice, which holds all the novel's disparate elements together.

Without the active intervention of Mr. Roth's intelligence ... the story fails to cohere ... 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.

"[6] In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle called it "a mediocre movie ... [that] falls victim to a fatal lack of narrative drive, suspense and drama.

"[7] David Stratton of Variety described it as "an intelligent adaptation of Philip Roth's arguably unfilmable novel powered by two eye-catching performances ... A key problem Benton is unable to avoid is that Hopkins and Miller don't look (or talk) the least bit like one another.