The Human Stain (2003)

No, No, No!
***SPOILER ALERT!***

Anthony Hopkins, with his distinctive Welsh accent, plays a black man(!) posing as a Jew (huh?). I guess he developed that Welsh accent as he got older, because it was totally missing in his younger years. Then there's the exquisitely beautiful Nicole Kidman, who does her best to look plain and bedraggled. Both premises are essential to buying into the movie. Both premises are also utterly unbelieveable. Hopkins and Kidman are superb actors, but I could not suspend my disbelief. There is simply NO WAY to believe that Hopkins is even the lightest-skinned black person ever to walk the earth; nor can Kidman hide her radiant beauty behind a frumpy look. No, no, no!

An odd way to tell a story about racial prejudice...
THE HUMAN STAIN, from a novel by Philip Roth, is a handsomely produced independent film that strives hard to be a serious study of the effect racial prejudice has on an educated college professor (Anthony Hopkins) who retires when he is accused of using the word "spooks" to cover two of his students who have never showed up for class. In the course of the story, we learn that he himself is a black man passing for white and dealing with a secret he's kept in the dark for most of his life. It has an odd way of telling the story with frequent intervening and overlapping flashbacks that are sometimes hard to follow. Even odder is the casting of Anthony Hopkins as a black man who looks white.

When he meets Nicole Kidman, we have two lost souls. She's running from her past, blaming herself for the accidental death of two children and running from a crazed ex-husband (Ed Harris) who threatens to break up her improbable relationship with the college professor. Kidman tackles a role beyond her scope as a trailer trash type who makes her living as a custodian cleaning up other people's messes. She is never convincing and makes the unappealing character both annoying and absurd, and has absolutely no chemistry with Hopkins. That he would be so attracted to her is highly improbable, given her sudden outbursts of insults and deep rooted anger.

Ed Harris and Gary Sinise do well in underdeveloped roles and both have some very valid moments where they seem like real people instead of contrived characters. Too bad they don't play a greater part in the story.

Production-wise, it's handsomely photographed in rugged winter settings but "the message" fails to get its points across with any subtlety. Wentworth Miller is appealing as the younger Hopkins, but it's hard to accept that the handsome dark-haired youth could turn into a man resembling the older Hopkins--and he's a bit of odd casting too.

Kidman is forced to recite lines like: "Action is the enemy of thought," which is about as meaningless as the priceless "love means never having to say you're sorry" (from LOVE STORY). She's a girl with no possessions who travels light, falls in love easily with an older man and later informs him that she has a crazed ex-husband. Both she and Hopkins have constructed their lives around a lie and it seems they deserve each other. Neither one becomes a sympathetic character we can really care about.

An interesting failure, it tries to say serious things about race but too much of it is unbelievable and handicapped by unpleasant characterizations and implausible plot contrivances.

An odd way to tell a story about racial prejudice...
THE HUMAN STAIN, from a novel by Philip Roth, is a handsomely produced independent film that strives hard to be a serious study of the effect racial prejudice has on an educated college professor (Anthony Hopkins) who retires when he is accused of using the word "spooks" to cover two of his students who have never showed up for class. In the course of the story, we learn that he himself is a black man passing for white and dealing with a secret he's kept in the dark for most of his life. It has an odd way of telling the story with frequent intervening and overlapping flashbacks that are sometimes hard to follow. Even odder is the casting of Anthony Hopkins as a black man who looks white.

When he meets Nicole Kidman, we have two lost souls. She's running from her past, blaming herself for the accidental death of two children and running from a crazed ex-husband (Ed Harris) who threatens to break up her improbable relationship with the college professor. Kidman tackles a role beyond her scope as a trailer trash type who makes her living as a custodian cleaning up other people's messes. She is never convincing and makes the unappealing character both annoying and absurd, and has absolutely no chemistry with Hopkins. That he would be so attracted to her is highly improbable, given her sudden outbursts of insults and deep rooted anger.

Ed Harris and Gary Sinise do well in underdeveloped roles and both have some very valid moments where they seem like real people instead of contrived characters. Too bad they don't play a greater part in the story.

Production-wise, it's handsomely photographed in rugged winter settings but "the message" fails to get its points across with any subtlety. Wentworth Miller is appealing as the younger Hopkins, but it's hard to accept that the handsome dark-haired youth could turn into a man resembling the older Hopkins--and he's a bit of odd casting too.

Kidman is forced to recite lines like: "Action is the enemy of thought," which is about as meaningless as the priceless "love means never having to say you're sorry" (from LOVE STORY). She's a girl with no possessions who travels light, falls in love easily with an older man and later informs him that she has a crazed ex-husband. Both she and Hopkins have constructed their lives around a lie and it seems they deserve each other. Neither one becomes a sympathetic character we can really care about.

An interesting failure, it tries to say serious things about race but too much of it is unbelievable and handicapped by unpleasant characterizations and implausible plot contrivances.