The Human Stain
Miramax Films | Release Date: October 31, 2003 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
57
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 39 Critic Reviews
Positive:
19
Mixed:
18
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
Chicago TribuneMichael 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
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger 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
80
TimeRichard Corliss
Elegant, thoughtful film. Read full review
80
VarietyDavid Stratton
Powered by two eye-catching performances. Read full review
80
Dallas ObserverBill 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
80
Film ThreatMark Sells
Each scene is enticing, draws you in, and tackles the verbal foreplay from the book nicely. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter Travers
The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie 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
75
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
The best thing the movie has going for it is Kidman's performance. Read full review
75
New York PostJonathan 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
75
Baltimore SunMichael 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
70
The Hollywood ReporterJean 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
70
The A.V. ClubNathan 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
70
Washington PostDesson 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
70
The New York TimesDana 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
70
Chicago ReaderJonathan 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
67
Portland OregonianShawn 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
67
Austin ChronicleKimberley Jones
The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The film's two big flaws are readily apparent: a clunky screenplay and the miscasting of the lead character. Read full review
60
NewsweekDavid 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
60
SalonCharles 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
60
EmpireAlan Morrison
Performances are good but not career best. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyLisa 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
50
The New YorkerAnthony 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 (Vulture)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
50
L.A. WeeklyScott 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
50
Miami HeraldRene 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
50
Christian Science MonitorDavid 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
50
New York Daily NewsJami 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
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick 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
50
Boston GlobeTy Burr
Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions. Read full review
50
SlateDavid 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
50
The New RepublicStanley 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
40
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesManohla 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
40
Wall Street JournalJoe 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.
40
TV Guide MagazineKen 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
38
USA TodayClaudia 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
30
Washington PostStephen Hunter
All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess. Read full review
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