There are some who may argue that it is foolhardy to adapt to the screen a book as dense as Mr. Roth's 125,000-word-or-so sprawl across more than 50 years in American race relations along the Eastern Corridor from Mr. Roth's East Orange and Newark, N.J., to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and, finally and fatally, to New England. Think first of the updated Aristotelian unities for the cinema: The ideal movie should occur over a short period of time during which the beginning, middle and end of the dramatic arc can be accommodated within a 90-minute to two-hour-plus running time. But to follow your protagonist from youth to old age, requiring the use of two different actors for the different stages of his existence, risks jarring the audience's suspension of disbelief in the cinematic illusion.

Nonetheless, Mr. Benton and Mr. Meyer have been adroit enough in the choices they have made-what to include from the novel and what to exclude and compress-that I feel emboldened to suggest that we are more culturally enriched by the film's existence than we would have been if the film had never been made at all. In short, the movie is fully worthy of the book, and will reach many people who might not have enjoyed the delightful experience of gliding through Mr. Roth's trenchant and zestful prose on the human condition. As Mr. Roth himself summarizes his enterprise, "We leave a stain, a trail and imprint-it's the only way to be here."

Still, if I weren't convinced that The Human Stain was one of the most important films of the year in terms of edification as well as of entertainment, I would excuse myself from any obligation of objectivity for my readers; not only because of my long friendship with Mr. Benton, my brief but pleasant acquaintance with Mr. Roth, and my professional debt to the late Anatole Broyard, the "passer" and Times book reviewer on whom Mr. Roth's Coleman Silk is partly based. No, what disqualifies me most of all as a completely disinterested reviewer of The Human Stain is my deep, almost uncanny identification with the inevitably tragic trajectory of many of the scenes.

To put it bluntly, I am of an age that makes me wince when I hear the voice of Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) speaking calmly of the consequences of his operation for prostate cancer. I nod sagely to myself when I hear 71-year-old Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) ruminate about a "first great love" and a "last great love." I have happened to indulge in such purple prose myself over the years. But most striking of all is the sheer coincidence of my mini-misadventures with the word "spook" back in 1988, when I addressed a Brooklyn College Alumni meeting. Though I am a Columbia graduate (1951), I was invited because I had lived at 1533 Flatbush Avenue, near the corner with Nostrand Avenue, in the mid-1930's-just about the time that Brooklyn College was built on a nearby empty field which was the site of a circus every year. If you recall, 1988 was the year of the ill-fated campaign of Michael Dukakis against George Bush senior. On this occasion, I was compelled to support my fellow countryman, Mr. Dukakis, against Mr. Bush.

"Besides," I added, "I'd feel very nervous with a spook in the White House," making what I thought was a satirical reference to Mr. Bush's previous service in the C.I.A. Seemingly out of nowhere, an African-American student appeared at my elbow and quietly handed me a note which read, as best as I can remember, "The student council does not appreciate the use of the racially derogatory term, 'spook.'" I had never used that word in that context in my entire life, though I had heard it uttered, but how could that be its meaning here, when I was applying it to the first George Bush? As it happened, there was no one to whom I could turn to explain. So it became just another anecdote about political correctness run amok.

In both the book and the movie, the plural form of "spook" is what gets Coleman Silk into trouble with the authorities and faculty at Athena College, where he has served as an innovative dean and a popular professor of classics. Enraged by what he perceives as a malicious persecution over a trivial misunderstanding, Coleman rashly resigns from the faculty without being asked. His staunchly loyal wife, Iris (Phyllis Newman), in rallying support for her embattled husband, dies from the stress and strain. (I must say that Iris' death is presented with unseemly haste in the movie, which is part of the problem of compression in any literary adaptation to the screen.)

The death of Iris sets Coleman on another rampage, to write a book showing how the treacherous faculty of Athena College "murdered" his wife. It is at this point that he enlists the help of the hitherto-reclusive Nathan Zuckerman, at the latter's mountain cabin, to write the book. Zuckerman insists that the professor must write the book himself, but in the process, the two men become close friends, to the point that Zuckerman becomes Coleman Silk's only confidante in his subsequent romantic entanglement with Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), a 34-year-old college cleaning woman of impeccably upper-class New England stock. Faunia is a walking poster child of misfortune-sexual abuse at the hands of her lascivious stepfather and batterings at the hands of her crazed Vietnam War veteran husband, Lester Farley (Ed Harris)-which precipitates the final tragedy of Coleman's tangled existence, when Lester begins stalking his ex-wife and her last lover.

The central irony of both the book and the movie is that Coleman Silk, the disgraced racist of Athena College, has been harboring a deep, dark secret for most of his adult life, living a lie as a white Jewish intellectual with invented parentage when he was actually born into a light-skinned African-American family with a very well-read father who toiled in Pullman cars with their lily-white clientele and their all-colored labor force. Coleman's father dies of a heart attack one day as he is ministering to the complaint of an angry white diner. The dream of Coleman's dad was that his son would enter Howard University in Washington and study medicine. But Coleman-a brilliant liberal-arts student and a slick boxer who never lost a bout-didn't wish to submerge his individuality in the "we" of an oppressed minority, and so he made the decision to break off all connections with his family and then forge a radically new identity.

In an inspired example of Bazinian doubling, a young Coleman is played by a white-skinned African-American actor, Wentworth Miller, who was actually born in Great Britain but raised in Brooklyn. He graduated from Princeton University, where he began acting and also sang with the school's touring a cappella group. He appeared in several television series before making his feature-film debut in The Human Stain . Happily for Mr. Miller, he has emerged at a time when he doesn't have to "pass" as white to obtain his full civil rights as well as decent roles as an actor.

The most heartbreaking scene in the film takes place between the young Coleman and his mother (Anna Deavere Smith), as she tells him-and herself-that his planned rupture with his birth family means that she may never see her grandchildren, except at a prearranged time and place that would serve to conceal her true identity from all the members of Coleman's white family. Coleman's brother, Walter (Danny Blanco Hall), subsequently warns Coleman never to go near their mother again, so Coleman's racial separation from his origins is enforced more or less from both sides-but Coleman eventually realizes that his chosen change of identity has become as much an enslavement to deception as a liberation of his sacred individuality.

But if Coleman's tortured repudiation of his family is the soul of the story, its heart resides in Mr. Roth's romantic exuberance over the first and last loves of Coleman's life. In parallel solo dances of female seductiveness, Coleman's first love, the Danish-Icelandic-Minnesotan blond goddess Steena Paulsson (Jacinda Barrett), and Ms. Kidman's hard-bitten Faunia Farley, project Mr. Roth's transparent tendencies in the realm of erotic idealization, but Mr. Benton and his cinematographer, the late Jean-Yves Escoffier-to whom the film is dedicated-manage to muffle the exploitational dangers of the provocative parallel by never losing their focus on the respectfully admiring males in both instances.

Ms. Barrett's Steena provides a second heartbreaking scene when she is sobbing helplessly on the train back from a visit, without a warning, to young Coleman's African-American family. "I can't do it," Steena sobs, and we all know what she means. For Coleman, the gates have closed forever on any hopes for a bridge between his two lives. Ms. Barrett, one in the seemingly inexhaustible supply of Australian actresses able to cry a river with passion and fury, remains memorable in a part small enough to have been considerably less than memorable.

As for Ms. Kidman's Faunia, I have heard people say that she's miscast, but I don't think that is the point. That she is clearly younger and taller than Mr. Hopkins makes up for a certain misplaced reticence in her delivery, which makes her performance as a whole less dramatically forceful than it might have been. But she and Mr. Hopkins develop a subtle rapport with each other that paves the way for total self-exposure on both sides. To preserve the continuity of the Coleman character, Mr. Hopkins has gone so far as to put on green-colored contact lenses to match the greenish eyes of Mr. Miller. And in a strange way, he is eminently equipped to portray a Greek tragic hero (Athena College, anyone?) impaled on the phallic thrust of a sexual hubris that he and Mr. Roth have expressed so eloquently over the years in their different art forms. Indeed, the reason that Faunia is so difficult to cast is that she is less a real woman with an interior life than a majestic projection of Mr. Roth's volcanic narcissism. As I said earlier, Mr. Roth and Mr. Benton are of my time, and I feel their pain. Perhaps you will, too. I hope so.

Once, over a staticky radio in a bouncing taxi on a back road in Egypt, I heard what I could only guess to be a concert by one of the country's star vocalists. On and on, the man yodeled and keened, winding gorgeous passages without taking a breath. And as the passages got longer and longer–they seemed to surpass human endurance–the audience went wild, then wilder. How could any mortal sustain, let alone keep topping, such glory?

This is what Philip Roth's writing reminds me of. The passages get more and more brilliant–so brilliant you can't stand it anymore–and then he goes himself one better. Whether he's giving you America's bygone glove-making industry down to its most minute particular (which works like gangbusters on both concrete and metaphorical levels), or parsing to a fare-thee-well the vagaries of the human heart, he is, word for word, paragraph for paragraph, Mozartean, simply unsurpassable.

Why, then, does his latest novel leave me so cold? Unfortunately titled, The Human Stain is the close of the trilogy whose first two installments were American Pastoral and I Married a Communist . The common thread is American turmoil over the last 50 years, as witnessed by Mr. Roth's eternal stand-in, novelist Nathan Zuckerman. Now in his mid-60's, after a long and turbulent life of sex-craziness, Zuckerman is self-exiled to a monastic two-room shack somewhere in the Berkshires. Poor Zuckerman, we soon learn, is a survivor not only of a quintuple bypass but of prostate-cancer surgery that has left him both impotent and incontinent. He wears a plastic diaper with disposable cotton pads. So much for sex.

And, in a very real way, so much for Zuckerman. Long gone is the naughty bouncing brio that informed My Life as a Man ; what we have in late Roth is a narrator who, like a tale-teller out of Conrad, exists more as a receptacle for others' stories than an onstage actor. In the somewhat awkwardly structured American Pastoral , Zuckerman does a quick fade a quarter of the way into the book, smack in the middle of his 45th high school reunion, after ushering on his hero, the godlike Weequahic High School jock Seymour Swede Levov. In I Married a Communist , the setup is simpler, if more far-fetched: At Tanglewood, Nathan encounters Murray Ringold, his old Weequahic English teacher, and invites him back to the shack, where, Scheherezade-like, Murray unfolds over six nights the tale of his late brother, the giant, doomed, left-wing 40's radio star Iron Rinn.

Both Levov and Rinn (né Ira Ringold) are golems: outsized Jersey Jews–6-foot-3 and 6-foot-6, respectively–whom Mr. Roth tries mightily to animate, but who ultimately feel more like myths than men. Alex Portnoy and the early Zuckerman were Leopold Bloom-ish in their messy humanity: We could feel for them right down to the kishkas . So strongly did their furies and demons and lusts seem to be Mr. Roth's own that we identified and stayed tuned. Swede and Iron, the big guys, stagger through their crises living statue-fashion, then topple with a mighty crash. Their monumentality is both the power and the weakness of the trilogy's first two books.

In The Human Stain , Mr. Roth has (more prudently but less successfully) chosen a life-size protagonist, wiry 71-year-old college professor Coleman Silk: "a neat, attractive package of a man even at his age, the small-nosed Jewish type with the facial heft in the jaw, one of those crimped-haired Jews of a light yellowish skin pigmentation who possess something of the ambiguous aura of the pale blacks who are sometimes taken for white."

This last phrase, we quickly learn, is a signal flare. For we soon discover that Silk–who has been forced out of his position as dean of students at the Bennington-like Athena College for making an offhand comment in class which, in the tinder-like politically correct atmosphere of modern American academia, is absurdly interpreted as racist– is in fact black: His whole life has been a lie and a masquerade. But neither his ouster nor his deception dooms him. Sex does. Thanks to the magic of Viagra, about which Mr. Roth has piercingly funny things to say ("Without Viagra ... I could continue to draw profound philosophical conclusions and have a steadying moral influence on the young, instead of having put myself back into the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication. Thanks to Viagra I've come to understand Zeus's amorous transformations. That's what they should have called Viagra. They should have called it Zeus"), Silk is engaged in an ill-starred, ill-advised affair with a 34-year-old college custodian named, Perelmanically, Faunia Farley. Faunia is a kind of caricatured culmination of a long line of blond Roth shiksas: spectacularly hapless, mentally acute but functionally illiterate and (it goes almost without saying) genius in bed.

The couple's nemesis is Faunia's ex-husband, Les Farley, a Vietnam vet so badly screwed up by his time in-country that the neat rubric of post-traumatic stress disorder doesn't begin to hint at the snake pit of his consciousness. Les' internal ravings give the book its most bravura passages, as Mr. Roth's lingering anger over the national damage wrought by the undeclared war attains a white heat.

It's difficult to know what to make of all this. American Pastoral and I Married a Communist were essentially monochrome canvases, keenly capturing the respective madnesses of the Vietnam and McCarthy eras. The Human Stain starts pungently enough, with a crisp pencil sketch of the weird summer of '98: "[I]n America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism–which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security–was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten 21-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion … the ecstasy of sanctimony." But while the dust-jacket copy huffs importantly about "public denunciation and rituals of purification," Mr. Roth doesn't manage to give Coleman Silk's story the epic weight of the rest of the trilogy. Maybe it's because the Clinton saga is too recent and insufficiently jelled to serve as a template. Maybe it's that Monicagate hasn't really produced anything like actual casualties. Least of all the President himself. It is Bill Clinton's very survival, that weird, obstinate resilience (symbolized, somehow, by his own facial heft in the jaw), that militates against a Nixonian depth of tragedy.

Another problem is that the as-told-to style points up Roth's chilliness as a writer. There are only two scenes in The Human Stain that have what feels like real, high-stakes human contact–a nicely strange one in the beginning, where Zuckerman dances with Silk, and a nicely scary one at the end, where the narrator confronts the dangerous Les Farley. The rest is seen through a glass, coolly.

Many years ago, J. D. Salinger's most famous character, Holden Caulfield, delivered himself of a naïve but appealing rule of thumb: "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." I've always been in awe of Mr. Roth's gifts, but have never had the slightest inclination to call him up. His books lack sweetness and enchantment; and lately, more critically, they lack love. It's terribly unfair of me, I know, but his real-life childlessness seems to contribute to a certain aridity. Zuckerman's withdrawal from the world feels a bit too close to home.

Piercingly, defiantly heavy-browed, Philip Roth glares out from his dust-jacket photos like an Old Testament prophet, super-serious, admonishing. He is a colossus. But as he himself has shown us about giants, the air gets thin up there.