The Human Stain
The Human Stain
When a disgraced former college dean has a romance with a mysterious younger woman haunted by her dark, twisted past, he is forced to confront a shocking fact about his own life that he has kept secret for fifty years.
匚卂尺ㄥ reviewedJune 29, 2025
I think it was the storyline but it could have also been the poor acting and the director's decisions that failed for me in this film. First, the over-emphasis on sex really distracted from the plots. It is what I considered pure pandering to a sex-hungry public and should have been kept to a minimum. Nicole Kidman really disappointed me in this role. If she had been raised by wealthy parents, she would not have reverted to trailer trash mannerisms or ways of speaking and she certainly would have felt comfortable in the middle class restaurant. She could have conveyed her complexity in a much more subtle manner. the same with Anthony Hopkins, who Ifound bland and uninteresting. We needed some early indications that he was carrying some secret within him and that would have at least created some tension in this otherwise very predictable film.
The story lead nowhere. There was no redemption at the end. the fact that he told his girl friend that he was black was not redemption because they were going through a process of screwing and revealing their secrets all along and his revelation meant very little actually, since he never told his wife or the administration and kept apart from his family. So I was left with "so what." The Ed Wood character was uniformly consistent and made no changes. I couldn't understand that last scene with him on the ice which went nowhere. Its not like the Hopkins character was a noble man (as in the Ajax character he kept referring to). He was petty and selfish and, I'm sorry, I can only see that lust and sex were his motivation for being with that woman, since, in true Hollywood fashion, they are screwing within a half an hour of meeting. Did I get a feeling that love was developing between them? No.
The theme of racial switching due to light colored skin is fascinating and has been much better approached (in, say, Imitation of Life). not dealing with this issue in this movie and confusing it with spousal abuse, Vietnam PTSD, political correctness on campus, grief at the loss of children, writer's block etc. just confuse the matter and make the film too superficial.