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88Most 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.
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88The 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.
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80Each scene is enticing, draws you in, and tackles the verbal foreplay from the book nicely.
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80Hopkins' 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.
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80Elegant, thoughtful film.
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80Powered by two eye-catching performances.
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75The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking.
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75Though Human Stain is sometimes too chaotic and sometimes too neat, it boasts some of the best acting of the year.
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75The 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.
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75Benton's version of The Human Stain feels under-energized and modest to a fault. Yet it still delivers a genuine sad sting.
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75The best thing the movie has going for it is Kidman's performance.
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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.
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70Roth'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.
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70The 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.
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70You 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.
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70Director 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.
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67The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles.
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67A suffocating quality stifles it, a sense that we're watching artistic excellence and important ideas being enacted rather than realized.
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63The film's two big flaws are readily apparent: a clunky screenplay and the miscasting of the lead character.
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60Performances are good but not career best.
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60It'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.
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60For 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.
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58The 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.
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50The 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.
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50Lives 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.
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50The mordant humor and far-reaching observations of the book don't come across in Robert Benton's "Masterpiece Theatre"-style direction.
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50Falls 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.
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50Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.
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50Roth'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.
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50As 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.
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50The movie coalesces into nothing: It's one of those films that makes you say, "That was powerful. Now what the hell was it about?"
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50All 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]
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50Meyer'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.
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40There'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.
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40Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.
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40Etched 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.
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40The 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.
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38It'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.
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30All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 19
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Mixed: 1 out of 19
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Negative: 6 out of 19
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FrankO8
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JoeS.8
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TonyB.6