Human Stain, The

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.

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.

Film Threat Mark Sells

Each scene is enticing, draws you in, and tackles the verbal foreplay from the book nicely.

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.

Time Richard Corliss

Elegant, thoughtful film.

Variety David Stratton

Powered by two eye-catching performances.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking.

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.

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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The best thing the movie has going for it is Kidman's performance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The film's two big flaws are readily apparent: a clunky screenplay and the miscasting of the lead character.

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.

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.

Empire Alan Morrison

Performances are good but not career best.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.

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.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.