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| The Human Stain | 
 enlarge | Director: Robert Benton
Actors: Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise, Wentworth Miller
Studio: Miramax
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $2.47
You Save: $17.52 (88%)
New (47) Used (55) from $2.47
Avg. Customer Rating:  89 reviews
Sales Rank: 15523
Format: Ac-3, Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 106
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: DISD34822D
UPC: 786936238570
EAN: 0786936238570
ASIN: B0001XAPX8
Theatrical Release Date: 2003
Release Date: July 20, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Movie disc only! We liquidate dvds from a large national rentailer. Movie disc works fine and we'll ship it in a protective sleeve for you. There is a 15% chance that it may contain a rental sticker on the disc that we were unable to remove. In stock and ships today.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Strangely intriguing. September 18, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Human Stain starring Anthony Hopkins is full of raw emotion, shame, and the power to forgive are the themes explored in this provactive film. Nicole Kidman has an affair with Hopkins, she plays a janitor who has a secret past and he has been carrying a secret of his own for pratically is whole adult life. They learn to trust each other and the although ending is a bit of a let down, I would say The Human Stain will keep you interested in unlocking the shameful secrets of these two shattered individuals. A film not to be missed, happy viewing!
 of course, it doesn't stand up to the novel August 12, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I came into this movie knowing that, as has been proven time and time again in the history of novels being made into movies, that the adaptation would of course be an oversimplification of the complexity of the book. The only question would be how gross the oversimplification would be.
Philip Roth's novel is a forthright examination of the thoroughness of misery. Roth, as perhaps the last among those we can call American Novelists, peers into the American character to see how we all suffer through depths of misery though we look anxiously for an easy lifestyle--we are, after all, Americans. But The Human Stain takes an honest look at everyone, from Coleman Silk, a classics professor pushed out of his university position due to a charge of racism, which he explodes over because he is a man carrying far bigger secrets that are tearing him apart, to Lester Farley, an abusive, dangerous and violent ex-husband who is also an incredibly damaged Vietnam vet.
Of course, for this movie, many of the character depths would have to be sliced away for the sake of time. One of the slices here, unfortunately, is of Lester, which I think is a shame, because that is an immediate indication that the movie is not going to address the breadth of human character than the novel does. Instead of being a sick SOB that we can actually feel bad for because of his own damage, Lester in this movie (played by Ed Harris, of course--who else?) is quite simply the raving ex-husband.
This lack of depth is more unfortunate, considering some of the actrors that are pulled together for this--I mentioned Ed Harris, but also Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman (who has been climbing higher and higher in my ladder of opinion), Gary Sinise--these are actors who could have dealt with the boxes within boxes of Roth's characterizations, but alas the script does not give them the opportunity. Some good moments, especially between Sinise and Hopkins, but overall a little flat. A shame.
 Having Read the Book I wanted to Satisfy My Curiosity About the Transfer to Film June 16, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Philip Roth's book The Human Stain was a fictional examination of racial/social and sexual biases in American culture with more than a dose of hypocrisy thrown in. I expected it to be a difficult novel to translate to film and I believe I was partially right.
The casting is excellent and Nicole Kidman is very good as Faunia Farley a bit of a lost soul being stalked by her violent and insane ex-husband who gets involved with an older college professor who has just lost his position due to an abnormally ridiculous case of Political Correctness. Anthony Hopkins is fabulous in that role although as the plot unfolds it becomes a bit harder to see him as the older version of his younger self as portrayed in flashback sequences. (Trying hard not to give too much away here).
A real strong performance by Ed Harris ( The most underrated guy in Hollywood) as the crazed husband cements this as a film worth checking out.
It's understandable why this wasn't a huge hit at the box office because it is a literary and somewhat challenging film.
Interesting plot-driven character study March 9, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Classics Professor Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), exasperated that two students have yet to show up for his class points to their empty seats and ask rhetorically, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" He should have chosen his words more carefully because the two absent students are black and Silk is subsequently charged with using racial slurs by the college.
Yes, this could definitely happen, although one would expect it to be cleared up once there was an investigation. However, Coleman Silk gets more than a little uptight. Something has hit a nerve. He has enemies. He doesn't cooperate and in fact resigns in face of the charge. His wife drops dead, and at the age of 71 Coleman gets involved in a Viagra-hyped love affair with Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), a 34-year-old cleaning woman and high school dropout with a past.
Turns out that Coleman too has a past, and that past partially explains why he got so uptight about the racial slur charge. Seems that Coleman has "passed." Seems that he was "colored" and didn't want to be colored and so forsook his family and passed into the white world and never looked back.
This is from the novel by Philip Roth, who has written many splendid novels. The adaptation is by Nicholas Meyer who did most of the scripts for the Star Trek movies. Robert Benton's direction is professional and clear. Anthony Hopkins is very good as one would expect and Nicole Kidman as a hardtack brunette with worry lines on her face is vividly real as the bitter, but vulnerable Faunia Farley. Ed Harris plays her also bitter, spaced-out, estranged husband, a twisted Viet Vet with malevolence on his mind.
The story is told in a straight-forward way with flashbacks to Coleman's past where we see that he was a welterweight prize fighter for a while and had his heart broken because his very blonde bride-to-be just couldn't stomach the thought of marrying into a Negro family. Wentworth Miller plays young Coleman and definitely looks and acts the part. Anna Deavere Smith plays his mother with the kind of dignity you would expect from a woman who raised the son of Pullman porter to become a classics professor at a small New England private college. Gary Sinise as Coleman's neighbor, Nathan Zuckerman (and Philip Roth perennial), narrates the story from the novel he eventually writes.
All in all an interesting movie that recalls an age gone by while at the same time reminding us that the politically correct postmodern world is upon us.
See this for Nicole Kidman who is on her way to becoming one of the great stars of the cinema as yet again she shows that she cannot be typecast, and for Anthony Hopkins, one of the more accomplished actors of our time.
Too good to have been an American hit in the theatres. January 26, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Human Stain (Robert Benton, 2003)
Robert Benton does not often direct movies, but when he does, you can be pretty much guaranteed a knockout: Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart, Nobody's Fool. After five years of silence (the longest in his career since the gap between his first and second films), Benton emerged in 2003 with The Human Stain, based on Philip Roth's rather obscure (for Roth, anyway) novel, and comes up with an interesting, complex, well-acted little film that far too few people saw.
Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a professor at a small New England university. As the movie opens, he is accused of racism and his tenure is revoked, leading to the death of his wife, Iris (Phyllis Newman, of the fine, cancelled-far-too-early show 100 Centre St.), from a heart attack. His resulting rage at this pair of injustices leads him to the friendship of a local writer, Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), and romance with a young woman who works as a janitor at the school, Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman). Faunia's ex-husband Lester (Ed Harris) is not too thrilled about the latter. Underlying it all is a secret Silk has been keeping for half a century that might destroy him... or save him.
Screenplay writer Nicholas Meyer sure has come a long way since Invasion of the Bee Girls. Here he takes a Philip Roth novel and does it justice, though to be fair it's kind of hard to buy Anthony Hopkins, of all people, in this role. If you can swallow your disbelief once the secret is revealed (and while that does happen relatively early on, it's still a spoiler), you're golden. Kidman plays her role to the hilt, taking on, in essence, the role Susan Sarandon popularized in the similarly-neglected 1990 film White Palace. Roth swung the age difference, but the rest of the trappings of the romantic tale are in place, and work just as well here as they did there. Zuckerman, Roth's detached and somewhat bemused Everyman character, sits on the sidelines and observes everything. I can't imagine what temptation there must be for anyone adapting a Zuckerman novel to bring Nathan himself to the forefront, but it's got to be monstrous (Nathan Zuckerman, after all, is the enduring character of Roth's novels, while everyone around him just passes through). Meyer resists, though, and Gary Sinise acts the part wonderfully. In the one scene where Zuckerman's presence indirectly affects the plot, Sinise just sits there looking half-embarrassed to be an agent of change. It's great stuff. Hopkins, on the other hand, is huge and bombastic and chews as much scenery as did Edward G. Robinson in his prime, and it fits. A fine film. If you missed it in its theatrical release, and you probably did, check it out on DVD. ***
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