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Human Stain, The

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 39 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 22 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Romance | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Nicholas Meyer
Philip Roth (novel)
Directed by: Robert Benton
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 31, 2003
DVD: July 20, 2004
Running Time: 106 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / Germany / France
Summary
RATING: R for language and sexuality/nudity
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise, Wentworth Miller, Jacinda Barrett, and Anna Deavere Smith
The story of Coleman Silk (Hopkins), a distinguished professor at a prestigious New England college whose professional life is shattered by allegations of racism and whose personal life is infected with cancer of a lie he has been living with for fifty years. (Miramax)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Feast of Love Kramer vs. Kramer
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The Human Stain has those qualities we often want but rarely see in our films: intelligence and ambition, decency and humanity, poetry and pity, fire and ice. Watch it and weep.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Most movie characters are like Greek gods and comic book heroes: We learn their roles and powers at the beginning of the story, and they never change. Here are complex, troubled, flawed people, brave enough to breathe deeply and take one more risk with their lives.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Mark Sells
Each scene is enticing, draws you in, and tackles the verbal foreplay from the book nicely.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Bill Gallo
Hopkins' beautifully detailed, deeply felt acting remains a joy to watch...But an even greater pleasure, at least for my money, is Kidman's dark turn as Faunia Farley.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
The sequences with the melancholy Faunia are monochromatic and those with Lester perfunctory. Benton too neatly -- and too hastily -- wraps up a story that would surely exert more power if it were messy and unrushed.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Benton's version of The Human Stain feels under-energized and modest to a fault. Yet it still delivers a genuine sad sting.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The best thing the movie has going for it is Kidman's performance.
Read Full Review >New York Post Jonathan Foreman
Though Human Stain is sometimes too chaotic and sometimes too neat, it boasts some of the best acting of the year.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Director Robert Benton allows the cast... to shine, but I was left wondering why such a very literary construction as this needed to be made into a movie.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
You feel as though you're watching a filmed play rather than a movie. Nothing wrong with that. But The Human Stain, directed more than well enough by Robert Benton, doesn't reach the emotional pitch it's shooting for.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Jean Oppenheimer
The thriller aspects of the story and the overall solid level of acting -- including a sexy performance from a red-hot Nicole Kidman -- keep the audience interested but never fully emotionally involved.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
Roth's novel was at heart a howl of rage against a corrupt, hypocritical, judgmental world, but Benton's austere adaptation--stunningly shot by the late Jean-Yves Escoffier--speaks largely in muted tones.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
A suffocating quality stifles it, a sense that we're watching artistic excellence and important ideas being enacted rather than realized.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The film's two big flaws are readily apparent: a clunky screenplay and the miscasting of the lead character.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
For all its shortcomings, The Human Stain is an honorable, sometimes moving attempt, better at evoking the poignancy of Silk's autumnal affair than exploring the moral ambiguities of his deception.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Charles Taylor
It's melodrama that rises to the complexity of art. The Human Stain takes a complex work of literary art and reduces it to tasteful melodrama. Its smallness is simply crushing.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Human Stain is, contradictorily, drained of color by the spotlight turned on its charismatic leads. Between the labors of simplifying the story for the screen and accommodating the stardust of world-class actors, an essentially, uniquely American tragic hero and heroine are bleached of real American tragedy.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Lives or dies by your ability to buy the sight of Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman snuggling in bed and enjoying hot, torrid sex. This may seem like a superficial approach to such a lofty, serious movie, but it is an insurmountable problem.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
As both book and film, The Human Stain comes to vividest life in its extended flashbacks, which offer the most compelling exploration of Roth's perennial themes of self-loathing and reinvention.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The movie is a disappointment -- not a stain on Benton's career as a serious and literate director, but only half the powerful drama it might have been.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
All we are left with, in essence, is an unlikely love affair, performed by two actors so remorselessly skilled that, by the end, you can't see the love for the skill. [3 November 2003, p. 104]
New York Magazine Peter Rainer
Roth's deep-dish introspection would be difficult for any movie to achieve, but with the right cast and more passion, we might have been pulled right into Coleman's psychic prison. The Human Stain isn't a movie of ideas, and it's too inert to be a probing character study. No stain is left behind, just a wan watermark.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
The movie coalesces into nothing: It's one of those films that makes you say, "That was powerful. Now what the hell was it about?"
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Meyer's screenplay has been called unsuccessful, and I agree; but, without glossing some bumps that are his doing, I'd say that in this case the trouble with the screen adaptation is the novel.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Falls victim to a fatal lack of narrative drive, suspense and drama. Kidman and Hopkins are wrong for their roles, and that, combined with a pervading inevitability, cuts the film off from any sustained vitality. The result is something admirable but lifeless.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
The mordant humor and far-reaching observations of the book don't come across in Robert Benton's "Masterpiece Theatre"-style direction.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis
Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page. But big ideas don't always size down for movie screens.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
There's so much less to the film than the novel: Nicholas Meyer's screenplay fails to capture the intricate subtleties of its subject and replaces Roth's moral scope with a moralizing tone.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
The book presented several special, perhaps even insuperable, problems for adaptation to the screen, and the movie, which was directed by Robert Benton from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, hasn't solved them.
USA Today Claudia Puig
It's problematic enough that the movie's lead characters are unlikable. But worse is the blackening of The Human Stain with a trite and forced plot, uninteresting digressions and clunky direction.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.7 (out of 10) based on 22 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Frank O gave it an8:
This movie had surprising depth that I was not prepared for. Although the casting did seem out of place, I enjoyed the storyline, especially Silk's dilemma regarding his family and passing as white. It was a surprise twist in the film and well worth the wait.
Joe S. gave it an8:
Kidman and especially Ed Harris deliver world-class acting. Wanna see true acting skill? Watch Harris in this movie. The cinematography almost pulls your heart out of your chest. The music -- especially at the end -- is very effective. Somehow this movie really has an emotional effect, even though the story itself is not that engaging.
Tony B. gave it a6:
This is an interesting story told in a more than satisfactory way. Its structure, especially its use of flashbacks, is very effective. There are a number of solid ideas here that are developed in a way that assumes the audience watching the film has the intelligence to appreciate them. The acting is first rate, as expected with this cast, but it's hard to believe that the Anthony Hopkins character is not Caucasian.
[Anonymous] gave it a10:
Resplendant.
Aimee P. gave it a2:
Very bad movie - I kept waiting for something to happen and it never did. If you like watching older men lay in bed with much younger women for 2 hours, watch this movie.
Vince H. gave it an 8:
I have already posted a review for this film before, but I would like to add that Rachel Portman's music here is fantastic and very overlooked since most people were either criticizing the script or the acting (which they had every right to do of course). The score that plays in the end credits is some of the most beautiful film music I've heard all year. Even if you didn't like the film, give the soundtrack a listen.
Pat C. gave it a 7:
An interesting if sluggishly intense drama about the damage people inflict on each other when they are unable to defer action and await clarity. A noble effort, and there is a great moral in this story about the insidiousness of racism, but it was overshadowed by the realization that this movie was about interesting things happening to dull people.
