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 stalker 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 grossed $5,381,908 in the US and $19,481,896 in foreign markets for a total worldwide box office of $24,863,304 against a budget of $30 million.
Critical response
The Human Stain received mixed reviews. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 42% of 155 professional critics gave the film a positive review, with a rating average of 5.48/10. 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." 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." 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." In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle called it "a mediocre movie … 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." 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 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." 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." The Times of London called it "sapping and unbelievable melodrama … an unforgivably turgid lecture about political correctness."
