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Verdict: Reeks, despite the valiant efforts of director Robert Benson and a first-rate cast.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
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The stench emanating from “The Human Stain” comes directly from its source: Philip Roth's 2000 novel of the same name.

Roth may be a brilliant writer — he's got the prizes to prove it — but he doesn't create brilliant characters (especially female ones), and his plots work better on the page than on the screen. Remember 1972's adaptation of “Portnoy's Complaint,” starring Richard Benjamin and Karen Black?

No, I didn't think you would.

Further, director Robert Benton seems an odd match for Roth's corrosive worldview. Benton's best films — say, “Kramer vs. Kramer” or “Places in the Heart” — are benevolent and charitable. Benton likes people. Roth doesn't — especially women.

In “The Human Stain,” Anthony Hopkins plays Coleman Silk, a respected classics professor at a distinguished college in the Northeast.

Silk is rather proud of being the first Jew to be granted tenure in any classics department, anywhere. One day, early in the semester, he wonders about a couple of students who haven't shown up for class in weeks. “Do they exist?” he asks rhetorically. “Or are they spooks?”

Famous last words. They do exist and they are African-American, which gives his comment a totally different and unintended context. Nonetheless, he's attacked by the P.C. faculty (in the book, the charge is led by a female professor acting out of an unrequited crush on Coleman, another lovable Roth woman). He resigns and the news kills his wife. Literally. She has a heart attack.

Six months later, he approaches hermitic author Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) and asks him to write his story. Zuckerman declines, but they somehow become best pals. In the film's most memorable scene, they dance together (Nathan is initially reluctant) to Fred Astaire singing “Cheek to Cheek.”

However, Coleman has a Deep Dark Secret. And it isn't that he's gay.

Now, a new story thread picks up. Coleman embarks on an “ill-considered and potentially disastrous” (his words) affair with Faunia, a woman half his age who works as a janitor/farmhand. She's played by a believably slatternly Nicole Kidman, with tousled hair and a cigarette-hoarse voice.

Now, the third plot. Faunia has a violently jealous ex-husband who's a Vietnam vet. He's played by Ed Harris, in his explosive mode. Well, at least he wakes the movie up.

And here's the fourth story. It takes place in flashback, when Coleman was a college student and made an unfortunate life-altering decision. He's played by Wentworth Miller, who loses his prominent nose and gains a British accent when he grows up to be Anthony Hopkins.

“The Human Stain” is one of those doleful efforts that has all the trappings and none of the substance of an Oscar candidate. It's flush with prestige; the cast shares 11 Oscar nominations and two wins, and Benton himself is a multiple Oscar winner. But Hopkins, despite a powerful performance, is woefully miscast. And even he can't make us give a rip about Coleman, who comes off as a selfish man whose life has been inconvenienced by a lie of his own making.

At least he has a character to play. Poor Kidman is stuck in yet another of Roth's repugnant sexual fantasies, who are nothing but bad news, but, boy, are they good in bed. And, preferably, they don't have a single thought in their golden little heads.

The best work is done by Anna Deavere Smith, who delivers a devastating monologue in the flashback, and by Sinise. He's one of those actors who is completely at ease onscreen and is always doing something interesting. Unfortunately, Zuckerman isn't that big a role. However, it says something about “The Human Stain” that, at the end, when we see Hopkins and Kidman dancing, we'd much rather see Hopkins and Sinise. The movie is that big a botch.