The Human Stain | |
---|---|
Directed by | Robert Benton |
Screenplay by | Nicholas Meyer |
Based on | The Human Stain by Philip Roth |
Produced by | |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Jean-Yves Escoffier |
Edited by | Christopher Tellefsen |
Music by | Rachel Portman |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Miramax Films (Worldwide) Concorde Filmverleih (Germany) |
Release dates |
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Running time | 106 minutes |
Countries |
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Language | English |
Budget | $30 million [2] |
Box office | $24.9 million [2] |
The Human Stain is a 2003 American drama film directed by Robert Benton. Its screenplay, by Nicholas Meyer, is based on the novel of the same name by Philip Roth. The film stars Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris.
In the late 1990s, writer Nathan Zuckerman has settled in a lakeside New England cabin following his second divorce and a battle with prostate cancer. His quiet life is interrupted by Coleman Silk, a former dean and professor of classics at local Athena College, who was forced to resign after being accused of making a racist remark in class. Coleman's wife died suddenly following the scandal, and he wants to avenge his loss of career and companion by writing a book about the events with Nathan's assistance.
The project is placed on the back burner when Coleman has an affair with Faunia Farley, a considerably younger, semi-literate woman who supports herself by working menial jobs, including at the college. Their relationship is threatened by the faculty members who forced Coleman from his job and by Faunia's ex-husband Lester, a mentally unbalanced Vietnam War veteran who blames her for the deaths of their children in an accident. Flashbacks of Coleman's life reveal to the audience his secret: he is an African-American who has "passed" as a white Jewish man for most of his adult life.
The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival. It was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Bergen International Film Festival, and the Hollywood Film Festival before its theatrical release in the US.
The film grossed $5,381,908 in the United States and Canada, and $19,481,896 internationally for a total worldwide box office of $24,863,304 against a budget of $30 million. [2]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes 42% of 154 reviews were positive, with an average rating of 5.5/10. The site's consensus reads, "Though the acting is fine, the leads are miscast, and the story is less powerful on screen than on the page." [3] On Metacritic it has a score of 57% based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". [4]
In his review in The New York Times , A.O. Scott called it "an honorable B+ term paper of a movie: sober, scrupulous and earnestly respectful of its literary source ... The filmmakers explicate Mr. Roth's themes with admirable clarity and care and observe his characters with delicate fondness, but they cannot hope to approximate the brilliance and rapacity of his voice, which holds all the novel's disparate elements together. Without the active intervention of Mr. Roth's intelligence ... the story fails to cohere ... At its best – which also tends to be at its quietest – The Human Stain allows you both to care about its characters and to think about the larger issues that their lives represent. Its deepest flaw is an inability to link those moments of empathy and insight into a continuous drama, to suggest that the characters' lives keep going when they are not on screen." [5]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "We have to suspend disbelief over the casting, but that's easier since we can believe the stories of these people. Not many movies probe into matters of identity or adaptation. 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." [6]
In the San Francisco Chronicle , Mick LaSalle called it "a mediocre movie ... [that] 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." [7]
David Stratton of Variety described it as "an intelligent adaptation of Philip Roth's arguably unfilmable novel powered by two eye-catching performances ... A key problem Benton is unable to avoid is that Hopkins and Miller don't look (or talk) the least bit like one another. Miller, who gives a strong, muted performance, convinces as a light-skinned African-American in a way Hopkins never does, which is not to suggest that the Welsh-born actor doesn't give another intelligent, powerful portrayal. It's just that the believability gap looms large." [8]
In Rolling Stone , Peter Travers said, "Hopkins and Kidman ... are both as mesmerizing as they are miscast ... The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking." [9]
The Times of London called it "sapping and unbelievable melodrama ... an unforgivably turgid lecture about political correctness." [10]
The soundtrack to The Human Stain was released September 23, 2003.
No. | Title | Artist | Length |
---|---|---|---|
1. | "Opening Credits" | Rachel Portman | 3:11 |
2. | "Iris Dies/Library Coleman Waits for Faunia" | Rachel Portman | 2:29 |
3. | "It's in the Mail/End Credits" | Rachel Portman | 7:03 |
4. | "The Two Urns/Father Dies" | Rachel Portman | 2:31 |
5. | "Navy Recruiting" | Rachel Portman | 1:01 |
6. | "Steena Rejects Coleman" | Rachel Portman | 1:28 |
7. | "Audobon Society/The Crow" | Rachel Portman | 2:35 |
8. | "Coleman's Funeral/Faunia Dances" | Rachel Portman | 1:14 |
9. | "The Accident" | Rachel Portman | 2:46 |
10. | "You Think Like a Prisoner" | Rachel Portman | 2:05 |
11. | "Frozen Lake" | Rachel Portman | 1:36 |
12. | "It's in the Mail/End Credits (Rewrite)" | Rachel Portman | 7:03 |
Total length: | 35:02 [11] |
Nicole Mary Kidman is an American and Australian actress and producer. Known for her work in film and television productions across many genres, she has consistently ranked among the world's highest-paid actresses since the late 1990s. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and six Golden Globe Awards. She became the first Australian actor to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award honour in 2024.
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. Its narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, including two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain,American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character created by the writer Philip Roth, who uses him as his protagonist and narrator, a type of alter ego, in many of his novels.
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". It is the first in Roth's American Trilogy, followed by I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).
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Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic, and editor who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death.
I Married a Communist is a Philip Roth novel concerning the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, known as "Iron Rinn". The story is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, and is one of a trio of Zuckerman novels Roth wrote in the 1990s depicting the postwar history of Newark, New Jersey and its residents.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1963) is a play based on Ken Kesey's 1962 novel of the same name. The play had its Broadway debut in 1963 with an adaptation by Dale Wasserman starring Kirk Douglas as Randle McMurphy, a mental patient and Joan Tetzel as Nurse Ratched. The play had a Broadway revival in 2002 earning the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play as well as a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play starring Gary Sinise.
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