Rating: 
Summary: The intransigence of comfort
Review:
Two lonely people come together, Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), a professor who quits his job after a supposed racial slur and Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), an eccentric younger woman disabused by the harsh realities of her life. A former welterweight boxer who has turned his back on his race, Silk lives as a white man caught in an ironic twist of fate. In a fine blend of racism and religious intolerance before the gratuity of political correctness, the young Coleman makes irreversible decisions that critically affect his later years. As a deeply melancholic mature man, Coleman finds sudden happiness with Faunia in spite of her personal despondency and refusal to believe in joy.
Moody and dark, played out against countryside covered with snow, the fine-tuned cinematography catches every nuance of shadow and flesh, as the movie evolves into an agonizing collision of desire vs. reality. Acting out the role of Achilles, pitted against fate and the grim determination of the gods, Silk refuses to give up the younger woman, no matter the consequences.
The film is carefully balanced, shifting from present to past, exposing the painful histories of the characters, the roots of their flaws. The supporting roles are beautifully played by Gary Sinise as Nathan Zukerman, a reclusive writer and friend of Silk's and Ed Harris as Lester Farley, an ex-Vietnam vet unable to purge the violence from his life. In the end, seeking an island of comfort, Silk and Faunia gravitate to one another, sensing at least a temporary respite from an often cruel world. "The things that restore you can destroy you." Luan Gaines/ 2005.
Rating: 
Summary: incredible film that makes you think
Review: "People are getting dumber but more opinionated," says the sister of Colman Silk, the character portrayed by Sir Anthony Hopkins. Silk is a college professor who is brought up on and then fired over the charges of racism, as he uses the terms 'spooks' to describe a story about the undead. He declares this ridiculous and will not apologize. Around the same time, his wife Iris dies. he is convinced the university's treatment of him contributed to her death. But Silk has a secret in his past that, if he was only to reveal it, would solve many of his problems, even if it won't bring back Iris. He starts an affair with an abused young janitor at his university whom he never noticed before (Nicole Kidman). She has her own demons, including a jealous becrazed ex-husband who will not leave her alone. Certain scenes made me cry, particularly when the film flashed back to Silk's hardscrabble childhood in 1940s New Jersey, and the formative experiences that makes him hide who he really is. Catch "Real World - London" alum Jacinda Barrett in a great role as Silk's first real love. This movie will really make you think about the circumstances that made Silk think that he had to hide who he was in order to live. The speech his mother makes to him about what he will one day give her as her birthday present is particularly sad. I don't want to give away too much here --- rent the movie and you will see what I mean.
Rating:
Summary: Revives memories if you¿ve read the book; otherwise, beware
Review: 4 stars if you've read the book, otherwise 2 stars. Background for this review: I am a big Philip Roth fan (I got hooked upon reading "The Counterlife", which is an absolute masterpiece), and believe him to be one of America's greatest living writers. I'd rate every Roth book since "The Counterlife" as a 4 or 5 - "The Human Stain" would rate a 5, although it's not Roth's all-time best or his recent best (of the recent Zuckerman books, I thought "American Pastoral" was the best). So, knowing the complexity of the Roth's books, I was amazed to hear that "The Human Stain" was being made into a movie, and naturally I rushed out to see the end product. For someone who has read and enjoyed "The Human Stain", I think the movie is reasonably good, primarily because it brings back impressions from reading the book. However, if you haven't read the book, I think that the movie is going to come across as overly complicated, jumbled mess, which obscures the many messages Roth is able to communicate in the book. "The Human Stain" is a very complex story with many disparate elements: current political scandals, coming of age, World War II, boxing, familial relationships, academic politics, race relations, political correctness and modern-day witch hunts, life in the underclass, abusive relationships, homosexuality, and multiple deaths and love affairs. Any two or three of these elements could easily fill up a two hour movie. Surprisingly, the moviemakers chose to bring almost all of these elements into the movie, in an attempt to be faithful. However, without hundreds of pages and hours of the reader's attention, and without Roth's genius to tie it all together and add meaning, I don't think it works as a stand-alone movie. There is one excellent acting performance in the film: Ed Harris is almost as riveting playing psychotic Vietnam vet Lester as Anthony Hopkins was playing Hannibal Lecter. Casting this film is indeed a nearly impossible task. I was able to suspend some disbelief to appreciate Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk, but it is true that the actor who plays the young Coleman Silk (who is actually closer to Silk's racial profile) doesn't look anything like Anthony Hopkins. The worst casting was Gary Sinise as Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Sinise is way too young to play an impotent Jewish writer in his twilight years. What recent Philip Roth book would make the best movie? I think "Operation Shylock": it has the most straightforward plot whose central element (Roth's double identity) could easily transfer to the screen, and there is even a decent amount of action and suspense. I don't know why the producers chose to film "The Human Stain" - it presents a much greater challenge for them and audience members who haven't read the book.
Rating: 
Summary: really a 3 1/2 star rating
Review: A film by Robert Benton I was actually looking forward to this movie. I loved the Philip Roth novel that this movie was based on, and there is some serious acting talent involved. The director is the same one who made Kramer VS Kramer. With all of this talent, and all of this promise, the film does not ultimately deliver. This film is narrated (periodically) by Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise). Zuckerman is a writer who is living in a cabin near Athena College. He tells us about Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins). Coleman was the Dean of Athena College. He retired in the midst of a rather large scandal due to an alleged racial slur he made in a classroom ("are they real, or are they spooks"). In context, he was asking if two students were ghosts. Out of context, he asked if two students (who had not attended a single class in 5 weeks) were spooks, and those two students turned out to be black. Coleman turned to Zuckerman to write the story of this absurd charge. Zuckerman says that he can't write it, but as Coleman and Zuckerman become friends, we are shown Coleman's life in the past and present. The racist allegation is absurd because Coleman, despite his white skin, is a black man. His parents are black (though light skinned), his sister and brother are black. Coleman just happens to have skin so light he can pass as a white man (it's not impossible, a minor white character in the film is actually played by a black man). We see Coleman's past, and see how he decides to identify himself a white man rather than accept who and what he is. In the present, Coleman has begun an affair with Faunia Farely (Nicole Kidman), a woman 40 years younger than he is. Coleman's wife had died, and Faunia just seems to want sex and a little companionship. Coleman feels like a new man (all the while extolling the virtues of Viagra). The only problem is that Faunia's ex-husband Les (Ed Harris) is still stalking her and is angry and resentful towards both Faunia and Coleman. The movie weaves these two stories together (the past and present), and together it makes up The Human Stain. While this worked incredibly well in the novel, in the film it seems to be missing something. The parts are greater than the whole. The acting in this movie is fantastic. This may be Ed Harris's best work in several years (despite his recent Academy Award nominations). Hopkins, Kidman, and Sinise are all solid. The only failing is in the construction of the movie. It all fits together, but it doesn't seem to work as well as it should. The Coleman/Faunia storyline is the main story, but anytime the movie slips into flashback, we are taken completely out of that previous story (despite how well done the flashbacks are). The other problem is that there just isn't a whole lot to the Coleman/Faunia story. The Human Stain has a lot to recommend it, but when taken as a whole...it just doesn't succeed or live up to its pedigree.
Rating:
Summary: An Intelligent Picture!
Review: a film that needed to be made and a story that needed to be told, amazing performance from both Anthony and Nicole, just an amazing film, a must own movie!!
Rating: 
Summary: Powerful moments inside sloppy script
Review: Ah, I just finished viewing the Human Stain. It had so much potential, but was a victim of illogical plot development. The most powerful theme is the rejection of race by the main character -- and the writer should have created more tension and drama with that and left the affair with the cleaning woman for another movie.
It was so inane for the script to dismiss the "spook" comment as innocent because it was uttered by a tragically undercover black man. Hello? Been to film school? That's the perfect dramatic hook for the character. What if he meant it because of how society's prejudice drove him to hate his blackness and the lower rung he was, by color, relegated to. What if in the flashbacks of his secret black life we learned what pushed him to cultural self-rejection , to, as his mom said, "murdering" his black self. What if he finally let that venom out in class one day because he felt the truant black students epitomized the behavior that made society deem blacks lazy, shiftless, and worthless. More drama would have been created if he successfully convinced the college his remark was harmless and he got his job back -- all the while the audience knows he hates both his blackness and the society that compels him to reject it.
Instead we get a completely unnecessary love story, and superflous characters like the Vietnam veteran and the writer friend. And asinine preaching at his funeral about why his spook comment was not racist because he was black. BTW, why was the main character's death essential to this plot? Two other people had already unnecessarily died. Ridiculous story development here.
Rating:
Summary: A special though tragic film
Review: Based on the novel by Phillip Roth, this is a special film, exploring issues of race, hypocrisy, relationships and the tragedy of the human condition.
Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a classics professor at an eastern Ivy League college. During his tenure as Dean of the school, he brought the college from a mediocre one to one of excellence. In the politics of academia, where bureaucracy can be so entrenched, change is the enemy, thus Coleman Silk's efforts towards excellence, inevitably makes a few enemies.
In the late nineties, during the Clinton administration, the atmosphere of so-called political correctness hovered like a spectre, censorship reigned supreme, and as one of the characters at the end of the film states, "People have become so dumb, but they all have an opinion." Professor Silk makes the mistake of calling two conspicuously absent students "spooks", in the definitive context of absence or invisibility, not in the 50's slang for black American. In fact, he never met these students, but his words are taken as racial slurs because the students are black Americans. (This proves to be a great irony as the film progresses) This is an interesting example of censorship at the time, as in so many cases, the person or people crying racism or explicit sex or whatever the issue, more often than not, is taken out of context, turning it into something other than what it actually means. Out of principle, and because, out of fear, no one supports him, he is forced to resign just before his retirement. To add insult to injury, Silk's wife dies in his arms from a heart attack on that very day.
Enter Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Siniese) the "writer in hiding" and narrator of the tale. The two men forge a bond that is both interesting and touching. The scene where they dance `cheek to cheek' on the porch over a sentimental song was a work of pure theatrical genius. There is no question that both these fine actors are at the top of their art form. It is here that Silk confesses that he is involved with a thirty-four year old woman. Enter Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) a beautiful working class girl with a legion of personal issues: sexually abused as a child; a battered wife from a psychotic husband, (Ed Harris) and two dead children due to an accident that is explained in the film but remains vague. The relationship between Silk and Farley is an unusual one as there is a vast age difference and both are so different socially and otherwise. But they connect and have an obvious need for one another, which causes the people around them to gossip, threat and make efforts to destroy them. Coleman Silk has one of the better lines in the film, in order to justify this relationship:
"She's not my first love, nor my greatest love, but she's my last love."
This film is about many things: the evil of prejudice and racism; the ignorance, hypocrisy and oppression of censorship; the mysteries of attraction and love between people; it is about fear and our need for revenge; it is about making choices and having to live with those choices.
This is a special film and a wonderful story, intriguing and confronting but ultimately a tragedy in every sense.
Rating:
Summary: POIGNANT THEME, GREAT ACTING, COULD HAVE BEEN DONE DIFFERENT
Review: Benton (of "Kramer vs. Kramer" or "Places in the Heart" acclaim) has always made movies with themes on the subtlest emotional vectors. If you've read the marvellous but somewhat un-adaptable book by the same name (Phillip Roth's "The Human Stain") you'll know what I am talking about and in that case, watch the movie without any expectations of seeing a loyal adaptation because this isn't. If you are not familiar with Roth's book, the movie's spinal theme may be racial prejudice, but it is really the story of a man deciding, late in life, to love the unknown what is beyond books, pride, even self. To learn that lesson is to turn a stain into a blessing. Stylistically, I felt the theme could have been dealt with in a somewhat smarter way. Without giving too much away, the "scandal" at the heart of the movie really gets very little screen time which helps diminish its importance in comparison with Coleman's past. But we see so little of it that it belittles its own thematic importance, and the movie spends a great deal of energy setting up storylines and elements that get little eventual payoff. This is why I say the novel was a bit difficult to adapt. Following Coleman's life all the way along, not just its beginning and end, could have made the movie work better as a movie; so could exposing his secret to the world of the film instead of just to the audience. At one point, Coleman's sister says doing just that would have instantly cleared up all the scandal and misunderstanding. Wrong. It would have made everything much more complicated, much more textured, much less black-and-white. As it is, we are left with a movie about two people whose lives have already ended clinging to each other for comfort. But the cast alone is something I'd go rushing into the theatres for: Hopkins, Kidman, Harris. Hopkins' acting here is a slow, painful flowering, and Kidman, who late in the film has a long dialog delivered with such musical delicacy that it becomes an aria of regret and self-apprehension. In sum, despite my gripes with the handling of the film, this is a film you HAVE to see. I'll go as far as to say that it's worth owning a DVD of.
Rating:
Summary: A Powerful and Masterfully Done Movie
Review: During the first 30 minutes or so I was enjoying the film but not sure how they got so many fine actors to sign on to the piece. As the plot progressed, though, I was further drawn into the movie. Hopkins does a tremendous job in his role and proves his prowess as an actor yet again. The directing and editing are teriffic and the film as a whole interprets you more than you are able to interpret it. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Flawed but Interesting
Review: During WWII, millions of Jews whose only crime in the eyes of some where their being
Jewish. Thousands to over millions were sent into concentration camps where few
survived and many were murdered, even the innocent of innocent, the children. Those
Jews who managed to escape did so by fleeing to hopeful safe harbors in other countries,
or, they passed. Far from passing to gain material wealth, power, and a share in the
decadence of the predominant group, these Jews simply sought to survive and see
another day. One cannot help but admire those who spent the rest of their lives,
whenever possible, challenging racism and bigotry and injustice. The titled character in the HUMAN STAIN is far from being admirable and sympathetic.
Coleman Silk is a black man who chooses to pass as white to enjoy the privileges of
being white. He doesn't care to fight the injustices that deny his people their humanity,
but instead chooses to cater and bow down in honor and the keeping of such injustice
against his own people. Ironically, at the time he passes, those Jews who where unable to
pass were being killed, entire families. Even more ironical, Silk chooses to pass as
Jewish. He turns his back on his family, even after his mother in the movie pleads with
him in what has to be the best emotionally intense moment in the movie. Seemingly
without much conscious to morals, Silk starts his life new as a white man without anyone
ever suspecting him as being anything other than this. He marries a white woman, begins
a career as a college professor, lives the American dream of freedom without roadblocks.
Life is pretty good until his wife dies and two black students accuse him of using a racial
slur against them which is accidental and unintentional, but Silk so long denying his
heritage does not realize the power and mistake of the word he has used. At this point,
his mask begins to fall off and his past comes back to haunt him and it is not forgiving. The main problem with this film is the way the story is told. The makers would have
done better to tell the story from the perspective of the young Silk instead of the old Silk
who is played by Anthony Hopkins. Moreover, the character played by Nicole Kidman,
who Silk begins a May/December relationship with in the midst of the Clinton sex
scandel with a young intern, seems to pollute the storyline and burden it down. Kidman
plays her part well, as the entire cast is excellent, but her character should have been
exercised from the story on the big screen all together. It is the young Coleman Silk and
his family who are the really interesting characters deserved more time on screen instead
of only being seen in flashback scenes. The press for this movie was a lesson in the racial divide that is growing in the U.S. The
press took more of an interest in seeing how quick the guy who played young Silk,
Wentworth Miller, would distance himself from being black than they did in the moral
questions raised in the movie or book of the same name by a white man. Sadly, they may
have gotten what they wanted. I hope that I am wrong. I would take great pride in being
wrong!!!!! and offer an apology for the misunderstanding of Miller. Rather than
understanding the diversity of the black American community, that is, that black
Americans are a multi-cultural people whose blood roots extend not just in Africa but
also Europe and even Asia and all those places in between, regardless of the complexion
of skin or of the skin or race of one or both parents--the cause of the huge color spectra
among black Americans and blacks from North America to South America--, and, that
black Americans are a people proud of their ancestry in all its diversity regardless of what
only a handful of extremely bigoted afro-centralist don't want admitted and many white
Americans refuse to take time to learn and understand, the press has played to its own
blind and ignorant liberal bias that divides blacks Americans into dangerous social stratas
of ethnicities. For his part, Miller, who doesn't deny his heritage like he has done in
playing earlier roles in his career until the HUMAN STAIN, has shown a proclivity not
to correct his interviewers and has legitimized their prejudices that the one drop rule of
blood applies to all but a few of black Americans who have one non black American
parent, political correctness at its most perverse and dangerous. Miller doesn't
understand or doesn't want to understand that he is legitimizing racist fallacies. To those who choose to watch the movie, or even, read the book, keep in mind that the
story is written from the view point of those or one person not in the know to all the
nuances, diversity, complexity, pride, heartache and tragedy, joy, sometimes
embarrassment, anger, struggle, bloodlines, and stories to the black American community
no matter how sympathetic and understanding they claim to be.
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