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Human Stain, The
Miramax Films
FILM:
MPAA 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)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
Romance
|
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Nicholas Meyer
Philip Roth (novel)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Robert Benton
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: July 20, 2004
Video: July 20, 2004
Theatrical: October 31, 2003
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
106 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA / Germany / France |
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...
88
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.
88
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.
80
Film Threat
Mark Sells
Each scene is enticing, draws you in, and tackles the verbal foreplay from the book nicely.
80
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.
80
Time
Richard Corliss
Elegant, thoughtful film.
80
Variety
David Stratton
Powered by two eye-catching performances.
75
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking.
75
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.
75
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.
75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
The best thing the movie has going for it is Kidman's performance.
75
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.
70
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.
70
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.
70
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.
70
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.
70
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.
67
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.
67
Austin Chronicle
Kimberley Jones
The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles.
63
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
The film's two big flaws are readily apparent: a clunky screenplay and the miscasting of the lead character.
60
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.
60
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.
60
Empire
Alan Morrison
Performances are good but not career best.
58
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.
50
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.
50
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.
50
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.
50
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]
50
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.
50
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?"
50
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.
50
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.
50
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.
50
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.
40
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.
40
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.
40
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.
40
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.
38
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.
30
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.
 The average user rating for this movie is 5.6 (out of 10) based on 21 User Votes
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