Rating: 
Summary: Undervalued Film
Review: I cannot understand the animosity of reviewers to this film. Don't believe what you've heard regarding the miscasting of the two lead actors either. Both Hopkins and Kidman are very, very good. I've never read the novel so I can't comment on the difference between the film and the written word. What's on the screen is quite engrossing and moving. The direction by Robert Benton is also very good, particularly with regard to framing of idividual scenes and overall pacing. I will most certainly buy this film on DVD.
Rating:
Summary: The old goat
Review: I was finally able to view this movie on DVD. It only had a limited theatre release.Although it was based on a novel; It is based on real situations.I personally knew a college Instructor who was let go for failing an afro-american who did not come to classes.Being involved in relationships with the baggage of violence by exspouses are practicly a daily occurance anymore.I would hoghly reccomend this for a must rent or buy. Anthony Hopkins is a great Actor and Nicole Kidman is a good actress.This movie could have as a subtitle "a history of 20th/21st century america.
Rating: 
Summary: Big artists, mediocre work
Review: I was really anxious to see this movie. I have aleays loved Hopkins and Kidman and Harris is a great supporting actor for every film.But this film is really disappointing. Not only for the actors, but for the story which is too confusing and plenty of flashes-back. The accident in the first scene is also a failure, because the film loses all interest. Sinise's part is really strange: he appears in the beginning till Hopkins refuses to continue writing his book; in the middle of the film (I had forgotten of him) he appears in a dinner with Hopkins and Kidman and, then, forgotten. At the very end of the film, Sinise's character is again in the screen and now he plays the main role. Hopkins' play is really decent (I was fed up of dangerous-minds characters), but I think he is over-exploited. Kidman's is really not her best acting: extremely bitter and unexpressive. To sum up, a really boring film and, sometimes, uncomprehensible.
Rating: 
Summary: knowing who you are
Review: I wonder about the book upon which the film is based. Somehow I imagine that all the characters and their stories unfold in a more graceful way than they do (or can) with the limitations of a film. Nevertheless, the film does manage to convey both the seeming injustice of what happens to Anthony Hopkins' character as he nears the end of his career and the irony of it happening. It reinforces, in much the same way as the more recent House of Sand and Fog adaptation does, how obsessed people are with preserving a front or facade behind which they have lived for so long that they no longer know how to live otherwise, nor how to acknowledge the truth of their circumstances, even if it would save them. Hopkins is predictably good in the role; Gary Sinise is good but somehow superfluous in his role as the narrator of the story; Nicole Kidman is good but somehow still not believable here because she is just too beautiful, too demure. In some ways, she is excellent and fits well in this role as a woman who has left behind a privileged background and gone down a path riddled with so much loss and misfortune and grief that she has deteriorated into the standoffish and icy woman she seems to be. But does she fit the role of cleaning woman and woman who awakens early to milk cows? Almost, but not quite. She did not disappear into this role. As a completely unhinged, disturbed Vietnam veteran/Kidman's husband, Ed Harris is somehow... alarming. In a good way. The back story about the history of Silk's (Hopkins's) character is a well-handled matter, which ultimately clues the viewer in to the irony and sheer ridiculousness of charges waged against Silk in the present day.
Rating:
Summary: its' alright
Review: I would maybe watch this film 3 times at the most, it's interesting at times but 20 percent of it is pure drek, the other artsy and appeakling though...
Rating: 
Summary: Underrated and Powerful
Review: Just when you think the critics are starting to get it right, they get it wrong again. That's what happened to this film. People stayed away in droves from this well done and thoughtful film by a director with a subtle touch that escapes most of our video age movie going public. Anthony Hopkins, Gary Sinise, and Nicole Kidman give real performances that will challenge and hopefully enrage some of you into seeing the dangers of social convention and why we let bad things happen. This is a movie for people who ask questions, not just for those who feel they have all the answers.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed bag or results, but interesting and good!!
Review: My feelings are mixed about this movie. From what I have read in the professional reviews of this movie, the opinions are just as mixed. In sum, it is a movie that will hopefully give one something to think about at its surprising conclusion. Simply put, THE HUMAN STAIN is pretty much a revampted telling of an old tale that has facinated white audience since forever and opened wounds and insulted some black audiences. But, it stands apart from all its other predecesors out of the Hollywood movie machine in a good way that makes it worth seeing in that it's lead character played by Anthony Hopkins isn't stereotypically sympathetic and has depth. Still, his manipulative, cannibalistic and criminal Hannibal Lector has more integrity than his Coleman Silk. The great and admirable Anthony Hopkins plays an aging professor with a dark secret who is accused of a racial slur by a student. Through a series of flashbacks, his secret is gradually revealed to the audience--his being a black man passing as white-- as he tells his story to a reporter and begins an affair with a young illiterate janitor on campus, Nicole Kidman. This young woman has a few secrets of her own like a possessive and obsessive husband. Plotwise, I think the only minor flaw in the story will be that involving Kidman's charater's problems. Only a little, they interrupt the real focus of interest of Hopkins's Silk. Though another trite tale of the mulatto, at lease the characters are 3 diminional thanks to writing,Hopkin's, Kidman's and the supporting actors performances(e.g. Gary Sinise, Ed Harris and Wentworh Miller--the young black man who plays Hopkins in his youth, and Anna Deavere Smith whose scenes and words to her son the young Silk are not fogettable, even Oscar worthy). Coleman Silk turns his back on his family and people to enjoy all the privileges and power of having white skin. Instead of challeging prejudices, he enforces and caters to the very prejudices that deny him to be treated fairly as a black man. At the movies conclusion one is forced to asked if anything has really changed for the better in real life. From what I have noticed in popular culture, the media and all the answer is..... Though the majority of black Americans like the characters played by Wentworth Miller and Anna Deavere Smith are a racially and culturally mixed people regardless of the complexion of skin ,or, whether both parents are black American or one parent is white or whatever, there are still those who will run as far away from being labeled black as they can get and declare themselves as separate but equal instead of challeging old inherited ideas of bigotry. Political correctness has warped into a new mask to hide self-hatred and racism. There are versions of Coleman Silks that still exist today, both dark and fair skinned, in the black community--even other non-black communities. Society still hasn't shed all its prejudices for those it looks upon as having the wrong skin color ,or, set of parents.
Rating:
Summary: Love in winter
Review: Ooooo! THE HUMAN STAIN offers the potential for so many Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Hopkins & Kidman), Best Supporting Actor (Miller, Harris, & Smith). Hopkins is Coleman Silk, an aging and respected professor of literature at an idyllic New England liberal arts college, who, in the "now" of 1998, runs afoul of extremist political correctness. He's accused of racism after referring to two students, who've been absent from his class for the first 5 weeks of the term, as "spooks", i.e. ghosts. Silk has never met them under any circumstances, but, as bad luck would have it, they're both Black. Called onto the carpet by the Board, and receiving no support from those who should know better, Coleman angrily resigns. When Silk breaks the news to his wife, she suffers a fatal heart attack. As Coleman puts it, his persecutors killed the wrong person. On the rebound, Silk meets Faunia Farely (Kidman), who holds down three blue collar jobs, is separated from her abusive husband, a psychotic Vietnam vet named Lester (Ed Harris), and who keeps the ashes of her two dead kids under the bed. Faunia describes her troubled situation as befitting "trailer trash", and carries more baggage than a loaded 747. But Silk is besotted, and embarks on a torrid love affair with the 30-year younger woman. As Silk declares to his writer friend Nathan (Gary Sinise): "This is not my first love, it's not my great love, but it's my last love". It's love - and great sex - in the winter of Coleman's life. Even Viagra gets a verbal plug. THE HUMAN STAIN is also a tale of "racial passing", i.e. the process of shifting one's racial identity. You see, Coleman has a secret that he's kept buried for decades. (No, it's not that he's Welsh like Hopkins, but something else.) The film jumps back and forth between 1998 and the late 1940s, when a young Silk (Wentworth Miller) chooses to make the transition and abandon his natural family forever. It's only now, in a last orgasm of sharing with Faunia, that Coleman can unburden himself. The plot sounds like grist for a maudlin TV soap, but is raised to heights of excellence by extraordinary performances, especially Hopkins and Kidman. Hopkins wore green contact lenses to match Miller's eye color, and the two men synchronized speech and body movement characteristics to make the age transition as seamless as possible. Nicole spent time in shelters for abused women to acclimatize herself to aspects of the role. And a scene where she longs to touch the back of Coleman's neck is Oscar material by itself. Perhaps the most poignant sequence involves the young Coleman and his mother (Anna Deavere Smith), when the latter suggests what her birthday present might be five years hence. It brings tears to her son's eyes, and perhaps some of those in the audience. Smith's role is not extensive, but certainly memorable. "Human stain" refers to the indelible mark, however miniscule in the universal scheme of things, that each of us makes on the world and which can't be undone. This film is about Coleman's stain and his coming to terms with it. At one point, Coleman asks Faunia, battered by life and circumstances, what she wants from their relationship. She responds: "kindness". This is, for each of us perhaps, the greatest truth of all.
Rating:
Summary: "How far would you go to escape the past?"
Review: Robert Benton's "The Human Stain" is a well-intentioned, ambitious but ultimately deeply flawed film. It does a masterful job of passing for a profound, Oscar-caliber film. So masterful, in fact, that for long stretches of time you don't notice that it's simply not working.
It boasts an incredible A-list cast including Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris, it does indeed boast some Oscar-worthy performances. I was especially impressed by Kidman's complete transformation into a somewhat-less-than-classy janitor. In addition to the tour-de-force cast, there's Benton's artsy direction style and the even-artsier cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier's beautiful work. Escoffier died shortly after filming wrapped and the film is dedicated in his memory. And thene there's the esteemed Rachel Portman's beautifully composed score. And then there's the source material which was adapted from the brilliantly complex novel by Philip Roth.
However, these glittering pieces never fit together into a movie that's worthy of its prestigious pedigree. It seems unfair, then, that all of that talent and expertise has resulted in a film that, while beautifully crafted, is so emotionally detached, remote, and confused by itself. I haven't read Roth's novel, but I suspect that screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, in his attempt to get all the main characters and events from the book onto the screen, had to leave a lot of connective material behind. That material, whatever it may be, may have seemed less important to Meyer, but without it the parts of Roth's story just drift, disconnected, in their own peculiar orbits.
Hopkins plays Coleman Silk, a college professor who loses his job over a supposedly racist remark. The irony of this charge forms the base theme for the story. Silk's comment is innocent because of "the big secret" he has hidden for many years. After resigning from the college where he had worked for years, he begins an affair with Faunia Farley, played by Kidman. She has her own emotional baggage and is unable to commit to the relationship with Coleman. The affair, however, revitalizes Silk and he is finally able to confront some of his past demons.
Just about the time all these conflicts are coming to a head, the whole story comes to a crashing halt. There is an extended epilogue. The movie staggers on for about 20 more minutes, but the story has been decapitated, and has nowhere to go. The ending is anti-climactic in the most extreme sense of the word.
The storyline is periodically (and annoyingly) interrupted by extended flashbacks of Coleman as a young man in 1944 New York. It's in these scenes that we learn "the big secret" that Coleman has spent his life concealing. This is the hidden core of the film. And it ends up being the ultimate failing of the film. The flashbacks work fine on their own merits, but they don't feel connected at all to the rest of the film. The flashback scenes, and the secret they contain, seem to have no impact on the later scenes. If somebody told me that Hopkins was never even told by Benton what went on in the flashblacks, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Kidman, meanwhile, takes a good many risks, playing not just seductive but lowbrow to considerable effect; her character, however, is never fully explored, and a few of her scenes are bizarrely unexplained (especially one in which she talks to a caged crow in a campus classroom, which comes out of nowhere and makes very little sense).
Rating:
Summary: Good movie (if you're expecting a mediocre one.)
Review: So much of movie watching has to do with the hype, and therefore, expectations, surrounding a film. Since I had not heard much of this movie, I was surprised to find such an all star ensemble in an unheralded film. So I had the pleasure of simply watching it with no expectations, no book to compare it with, etc. The result was a compelling story of twisted lives coming to grips with themselves and their pasts. Nicole Kidman has to be one of the greatest actors of our generation, since she plays her white trailer trash role to perfection, accent and all. Anthony Hopkins use of subtle expression and understatement add tension and depth to the film. If you like complex, interwoven stories with good characters, you will like this film.
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