User Reviews

Well, talk about movie twists! This one didn't wait until the end of the picture to reveal that Anthony Hopkins' character was a black man who had turned his back on his roots to garner success as an educator and dean of fictional Athena College in the equally fictional town of Athena, Massachusetts. I'm not certain about how I'm to react to that bit of information. Story wise it becomes a compelling element when we first learn that Coleman Silk (Hopkins) is called on the carpet and loses his job over a politically incorrect remark taken as overt racism. In a different picture, he could have sued the pants off the college and probably come away with a bundle with the help of a competent lawyer. Instead he takes a more destructive path by hooking up with one of the local trailer trash citizens named Faunia Farley. Even in her flaunty attire or working class janitor uniform, it's a tough sell making Kidman look any less glam than she really is, so that part of the picture required a good suspension of disbelief. But not as much as her taking up with Hopkins' character who was easily twice her age, whether the relationship was one of a sympathetic nature or not. It might have been better to substitute the high profile celebrities in this film with those of lesser name recognition, since the entire exercise becomes one of wondering how in the heck any of this could possibly happen. This was one of those pictures I talked myself into a lower rating than what I was originally going to give it just because of the incongruity of it all.

I wasn't going to add a comment here, but I found myself breezing through the other comments, with the constant "poor story structure" crap. Try "complex story structure" or "unusual story structure." They can't ALL be "The Incredible Hulk", folks. As for the complaint that the movie goes on for fifteen minutes after a climactic event: the film ends when the story does. The story isn't ended by the car incident.

I haven't read the book, so I took the film on its own terms. It's a film for intelligent adults with an attention span. The acting is great. Hopkins plays a character who is tragic in the classical sense: a potentially great man with a fatal flaw (and his is a whopper). Kidman is absolutely believable, Anna Deveare Smith is heart-breaking as Silk's mother, Gary Sinise is spot-on and Ed Harris is spooky (ectoplasmically speaking, not as racial vilification.)

This is a very interesting premise. Probably the biggest silver screen treatment of this premise since the classic, An Imitation of Life. This movie is not without it's flaws but it is definitely well acted. I hear that the act of "passing" was quite common. Not everyone did so for the reasons Coleman Silk does to completely run away from a black identity. Others did so to support relatives, etc. However, I'm glad to see the topic being addressed on screen. Hopkins, Kidman, Harris, and Sinise make for a stellar cast. The elegant Kidman has the hardest job in being convincing as a woman from a lower socioeconomic class. I think she was very believable.

I think it was the storyline but it could have also been the poor acting and the director's decisions that failed for me in this film. First, the over-emphasis on sex really distracted from the plots. It is what I considered pure pandering to a sex-hungry public and should have been kept to a minimum. Nicole Kidman really disappointed me in this role. If she had been raised by wealthy parents, she would not have reverted to trailer trash mannerisms or ways of speaking and she certainly would have felt comfortable in the middle class restaurant. She could have conveyed her complexity in a much more subtle manner. the same with Anthony Hopkins, who Ifound bland and uninteresting. We needed some early indications that he was carrying some secret within him and that would have at least created some tension in this otherwise very predictable film.

The story lead nowhere. There was no redemption at the end. the fact that he told his girl friend that he was black was not redemption because they were going through a process of screwing and revealing their secrets all along and his revelation meant very little actually, since he never told his wife or the administration and kept apart from his family. So I was left with "so what." The Ed Wood character was uniformly consistent and made no changes. I couldn't understand that last scene with him on the ice which went nowhere. Its not like the Hopkins character was a noble man (as in the Ajax character he kept referring to). He was petty and selfish and, I'm sorry, I can only see that lust and sex were his motivation for being with that woman, since, in true Hollywood fashion, they are screwing within a half an hour of meeting. Did I get a feeling that love was developing between them? No.

The theme of racial switching due to light colored skin is fascinating and has been much better approached (in, say, Imitation of Life). not dealing with this issue in this movie and confusing it with spousal abuse, Vietnam PTSD, political correctness on campus, grief at the loss of children, writer's block etc. just confuse the matter and make the film too superficial.

I think this movie is pretty unrealistic, to say the least. I love the actor Anthony Hopkins, but this doesn't make me change my opinion. Highly improbable indeed...in many aspects...even the romance between Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins is quite exaggerated (a woman like that, wouldn't fall in love with any man, even if he would be young and handsome, unless the (older) man would be very-very, I mean real rich). Then about the younger actors...Have I missed a casting for Fashion TV?!? Because, both the men and the woman..are so good-looking...This reminds me about the BayWatch Series, where all the woman were top supermodels and all the men were tall and handsome. Nobodey was fat or ugly, everyone was beautiful and young...like in heaven...Let's be serious! Is this the real life? The accident was, also, unrealistic...Probable but highly improbable... Also the issue with the white child of two black parents, already pointed out by somebody else...

POSSIBLE SPOILERS! I did not read the book, but from what I have read around it is a complex story, with deep characters and a lot of reasoning and verbage explaining them. The film does not seem to make a good service to the book, and no good cinema matches what may be a good reading. Still, the premises are quite promising, although too extraordinary to be believable. We are in the end-of-century US, and America starts to live its transition from a liberal thinking to a dominantly moralist society. The main character is a well-known Jewish professor of classic literature, who loses his career on unfounded racism accusations. Soon, we find that the three main characters are each doomed by personal tragedies - the professor by the dark secret of his origin, his much younger lover by child abuse, family abuse and the death of her children, her ex-husband is a traumatized Vietnam veteran. Too many tragedies translate in too little good quality screen time, and what works in a complex book does not work on the screen. What must have been good writing in a novel translates into too many words declaimed on screen, rather than in authentic cinema language. Wonderful actors as Hopkins and Kidman are look as mis-cast and their presumed chemistry never makes it to the viewer. It's still a better than average production, but never raises much above soap opera. 6 out of 10 on my personal scale.

What a terrible movie. It seemed like it had some potential, but it just kept falling apart. The Nicole Kidman trailer trash thing was WAY overdone. I realize it's acting, but Anthony Hopkins is really black? c'mon! A black boxing champion finds a future as a Jewish English professor? The killer gets away? The writer walks away from the killer and promises to send him a copy of his novel? I could see where the book could have been good. It's an interesting story. I suppose a black guy pretending to be Jewish could pick up an English accent, but it just went beyond my suspension of disbelief. I DID like the reminiscences of 1998. Funny how nostalgia is continually compressing :)

Possible Spoilers below . . .

You can more or less take it for granted that films adapted from literary novels will be disappointing to those who've already read the book, particularly when the novel in question is more about the intricacies of language and character than about plot or visual imagery. Personally, I tend to be able to enjoy reading a novel for the first time after I've seen the film it was adapted from, and I would hope that this thoughtful but ultimately fragmented film will encourage some viewers to pick up Philip Roth's novel, which is arguably the best of his career and the most succinct, biting critique of the New Puritanism of the 1990s, capturing broad aspects of some of the more troubling and contradictory characteristics of American life and history at the end of the 20th century.

There's much to like about 'The Human Stain': it's filmed subtly and with a strong sense of place, lingering on the frozen, dimly-lit environment of the Berkshires in winter. The screenplay manages to integrate more of Roth's vision than should reasonably have been expected, though the effort to do so makes the story seem rushed and too tightly compressed. Several of the performances are superb, particularly Wentworth Miller as the young Coleman Silk and Ed Harris as the psychotic Vietnam vet Lester Farley. Anna Deavere Smith and Harry Lennix are also excellent as Coleman's parents, making the most out of very little screen-time to convey the conflict between Coleman's ambitions and his sense of self and family.

Anthony Hopkins, as brilliant as he may be, may not have been the best choice for Coleman Silk; his performance in many ways is saved by another actor, Wentworth Miller, whose superb parroting of Hopkins' voice and mannerisms establishes a scant degree of plausibility for Hopkins' adult incarnation of Coleman. Surely there were better options--Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss, James Caan--actors who would at least be believable as Jewish if not as light-skinned African-American. Hopkins fares well enough--he masterfully carries one of the book's best scenes, when Coleman dances with Zuckerman--but Hopkins never really convinces us that he could be Coleman.

Gary Sinise is adequate as Zuckerman, and manages to convey the character's withdrawn, contemplative nature well. The film chooses to recast Zuckerman as middle-aged (in the novel, Zuckerman is roughly the same age as Silk), presumably to afford for a sub-plot in which Silk's friendship with Zuckerman draws the younger man out of isolation and melancholy--a bit of an unnecessary Hollywood touch, and inappropriate to the context.

The real flop here is Nicole Kidman as Faunia Farley. Any number of contemporary actresses could have made much more of this superb role--Cate Blanchett leaps to mind; other better choices include Emily Watson and Laura Linney. Kidman can be fabulous when properly cast, but her reading of Faunia is tone-deaf, unbelievable, and unsympathetic. It's not that she's too pretty or too refined--Faunia is meant to be sexually alluring, and Kidman's fine features aren't inappropriate to the character, who ran away as a girl from a wealthy family. But here her gestures and dialogue are caricaturish to the point of parody. You never sense the spark between Faunia and Coleman that is so essential to the novel.

Otherwise, the problems mostly reside in the effort to compress too much information into a 100-minute film. Director Robert Benton is intent on showing us as much of Coleman's intricate backstory as possible, but the effect of this reduces our ability to understand his various dilemmas. We don't see his painful process towards deciding to pass himself off as white; a crucial subplot in which Coleman's nemesis at the university harasses him for his affair with Faunia is introduced but then abandoned; little to none of the rich detail that must have fueled Ed Harris' rendering of Farley makes it from page to screen, begging me to wonder why Benton didn't give us another ten- or twenty minutes worth of movie to even out the tone and fill in some of the grey spaces.

This movie is a good sketch of a brilliant book. Taken together, they're a rich experience. But if you're only going to have one or the other, read the book.

Overall The Human Stain was a decent film. The acting was good but the story had way to many conveniences. There were also many secondary characters whose actions were not properly explained or justified. I heard later that many portions of the book were ignored, which is normal (as 1 page of a book = at least 1 minute of movie) but missing pages are normally resolved in the screenplay. For instance the Firm eliminated the whole subplot of the Mafia trying to kill Mitch McDeere by having a single scene, `I am your lawyer and can never testify against you.' In contrast the Human Stain seems to just trudge along at times leaving a bewildered viewer.

STOP NOW to avoid SPOILERS….



There are many fine filmic techniques that save the film. The opening scene's missing students echo the disconnection Coleman Silk suffers from his brother and sister. The long shots of the porch dancing are masterfully filmed. The posts of the porch simulate the negative space between the frames of film stock and the effect is very pleasing. The set-up is duplicated later in the films closing scene and the two are the most appealing scenes in the film.

Gary Sinise turns in the strongest performance in the film, but there are some strong smaller supporting roles as well. Iris Silk's dialog at the end of the film is a sounding board for all that everyone who is fed up how silly the current political correct climate has become.

Annoying that we never really find out why all the Coleman's colligate colleagues abandon him. This is probably the biggest single flaw in the screenplay. There are many unexplained scenes involving the dean of the school. Maybe I should have read the book first.

I saw this as an advance screening and despite the screenplay issues would probably pay to see it again. *** (out of 5)

Who is supposed to believe that Anthony Hopkins is an African American? This is one of his worst performances, as an old bull-headed professor who has an affair with a much younger woman (Nicole Kidman, completely miscast, and out of her depth), who works as a cleaner at his University. This woman was an abused rich girl (apparently) who now has a psychotic ex- husband (Ed Harris hamming like nobody's business). The are lots of flashbacks to the Hopkins character's past, as a young man (played by an actor who doesn't resemble Hopkins in the least!) Gary Sinise plays Hopkins' writer friend who looks bemused most of the time. I was bemused all of the time.