The Human Stain

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

[©brad]

title is a little, uhhh... gross.



looks like he was getting road head when allofasudden he loss control of the car and ran right into a small apache indian reservation, killing two chickens, a bird, and a tool shed. then the apache folk get pissed and chase them, and the whole movie is them running away from the crazed apache ppl. (with more road head scenes lets hope.)

[chainsmoking insomniac]

Uhhhh....let's hope??? I'd rather just see Kidman naked than watch Hopkins get sucked.  
Just a personal preference.

[Finn]

Judging from IMDB, it's been delayed until halloween. CRAP!

[meatwad]

have to agree with chainsmoking insomniac

[Ghostboy]

Just saw it, and it's not too good. It reminded me a lot of 'The Life Of David Gale,' actually...not in content, but it had that same pointless sense of self-seriousness to it. There were some moments that were supposed to be meaningful that ended up being unintentionally funny. There are some lovely individual moments, but the structure of the film is just terrible.

It's nice to see Hopkins act again (as opposed to hamming it up), though.

[TheVoiceOfNick]

(SPOILERS)

The plot had some nice ironical twists to it (about his race), and I thought that really helped the movie become better than if it was just a love story between the two mains... the story was actually quit good, the directing as well... I do admit though, that it was a tad on the self-serious side.

[mutinyco]

Somebody with Photoshop should superimpose a knife sticking out of one of those Elliot Smith avatars...

[edison]

Somebody with Photoshop should superimpose a knife sticking out of one of those Elliot Smith avatars...

What does this have to do with The Human Stain?

[coffeebeetle]

Somebody with Photoshop should superimpose a knife sticking out of one of those Elliot Smith avatars...

What does this have to do with The Human Stain?

Aboslutely nothing.  And I want to smack him for saying that.

[godardian]

Ghostboy thought it was pretty bad... VoiceofNick thought it was damn good.

I thought it was 5/8 damn good and 3/8 pretty bad.

-Too many syrupy-"classy" Oscarisms to be a genuinely whole piece

-Bad expository scenes, some dull, very bluntly obvious expository dialogue

-Surprisingly deft with the issues it explores (racial "passing," political correctness on campus, which by now is the only plausible place to have P.C. be a concern).

-A return to some dignity for Hopkins after a few bad/lazy years, and Kidman just keeps getting better. I read reviews where they complain that she's too pretty to be this tough broad she's supposed to be, which I think is ridiculous. Her looks don't get in the way at all.

Gary Sinise and Ed Harris are fine in their tiny roles. It's weird to have another movie with a great Kidman performance and then Ed Harris hanging around the periphery acting all crazy...

[Fernando]

While Hollywood relentlessly pursues the teenage moviegoer, Robert Benton makes films for grown-up audiences, movies like Nobody's Fool, Twilight and, most recently, The Human Stain, based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth. Benton's stories focus on lessons that take a lifetime to learn and feature characters who grow more obstinate with age, only to melt unexpectedly just when everyone had given up on them. Even the director's early films -- powerful dramas such as Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart -- tackle the kind of human crises that only longterm dedication can overcome. "At this point, I don't see the beauty in the beginning of life as much as I see the beauty in the end of life," explains the two-time Oscar winner.

For most of Hollywood, the notion of "mature themes" is nothing but a euphemism for the over-sexualization of adolescent films. But for Benton, maturity remains that elusive quality that comes from having lived, an insight into certain subtle truths that arises only after decades of introspection. As such, Benton makes movies that audiences can grow into rather than out of, movies that may resonate more years after an initial viewing, when the experience of real life catches up and reinforces the observations he understood all along. Here, Benton shares five films that have affected him most deeply over the years.

Ride the High Country
(1962; dir: Sam Peckinpah, starring: Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott)
Ride the High Country is about two men: one is doing a job -- he's picking up gold and getting very little money for it -- and one is a crook, and they're big friends who spent a lot of their youth together. Joel McCrea's line throughout this is, "I just want to go to my maker justified," and in the end, when he is killed protecting this meager amount of gold, Randolph Scott finishes his job, passing on a kind of goodness or decency. I think it's an extraordinary movie about the summing up of life. I've done a lot of movies about older men. In a way, The Late Show, about an old retired detective who comes back to life, is like Peckinpah's story of two old cowboys with one last job to do. They both deal with the poignancy of age, and that also leaks into Nobody's Fool and Twilight and The Human Stain. In The Human Stain, that moment with the two men on the porch seems to me an extraordinary kind of scene, in which Coleman Silk dances Nathan Zuckerman back to life. And then he says, "I'm having an affair with a 34-year-old woman. ... I'm about to do something so foolish and so dangerous at a time when I know better." It tells me about the wisdom of age and the desperate need to return to vigorous life in the end of life.

Rio Bravo
(1959; dir: Howard Hawks, starring: John Wayne, Dean Martin)
I saw Ride the High Country before I ever began writing or directing, and I think it determined how I saw relationships in movies, that they were not sentimentalized or conventional. It captured the relationship between two men who were often at odds with one another, but there was affection between them. An extension of that would be the movie Rio Bravo, which is about a community of men with only one woman, Feathers, on the outside. In Rio Bravo, these men bitch at one another all the time. They argue, and yet they care about each other. The relationships between the people in all of my movies have always been kind of testy, whether it's a movie like Bad Company or Nobody's Fool, where the relationship between Carl Roebuck and Sully is one in which they love each other, but they argue continuously through the movie. Along the same lines, in Places in the Heart, John Malkovich's relationship with Sally Field is very edgy at the beginning, but by the end, it becomes a kind of love scene without anybody ever saying, "I love you." Rarely do people say that they love one another in my movies. It's expressed, but in an oblique way.

Nashville
(1975, dir: Robert Altman, starring: Lily Tomlin, Ned Beatty)
I'm a great admirer of Nashville's architecture in that I'm very drawn to interlocking multiple stories, which led me to pictures like Nobody's Fool and Places in the Heart. In Nashville, the intersecting stories move from one into another, and I love that form of storytelling. Nashville was a very original picture and a picture that showed [the way complete strangers can affect one another] in some extraordinary way, in the same way that Short Cuts did. It's as though by random chance you picked these people and the meaning of the picture comes from that intersection rather than something you've orchestrated. You've observed it, but the characters themselves have controlled it. I've always thought that there were roughly two kinds of director, each equally good: directors like Howard Hawks, in which character determines narrative, and directors like Otto Preminger, in which narrative decides character. I think a movie like Preminger's In Harm's Way, which is not on my list, is wonderful because it's at the opposite end of what I believe, and yet I like it very much.

Children of Paradise
(1945, dir: Marcel Carné, starring: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault)
Next, I like Children of Paradise because it's big and it's novelistic, and I've always had a pull to do films that are, for better or worse, sort of literary. I was a student in high school when I saw it. I lived in Waxahachie, Texas, and there was an art theater in Dallas, and I used to go every chance I got. I would take what they called an "interurban," which is like a glorified streetcar, through the countryside from Waxahachie to Dallas in the summer. I saw La Symphonie Pastorale and Rashomon and an enormous number of foreign films. I didn't know what they were, the same way I didn't know that Children of Paradise was a great movie -- I just saw it. Because I'm dyslexic, I was not very well read until the end of college, but because I went to movies constantly, what literary education I got was because of movies. I couldn't read a big Balzac novel, but I could get the same sweep and scale and complexity of story from a movie like Children of Paradise. It was complex in a way that American movies were not, and it was complexity of character, not of events. Another picture I saw when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old was Gene Autry and the Radio Ranch [most likely a version of Autry's "The Phantom Empire" serial], which mixes a conventional Gene Autry western with a science-fiction movie. It's one of the looniest movies you'll ever see. I've always loved mixing genres, which comes back to that.

A Place in the Sun
(1951, dir: George Stevens, starring: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor)
My fifth choice would be between A Place in the Sun and Jules and Jim, and each of them for the same reason. In those movies, there are events that echo other events. In the opening credits of A Place in the Sun, Montgomery Clift is hitchhiking down the side of the road. A big white convertible zooms past him, and there is Elizabeth Taylor driving the car [which audiences will come to associate with her character]. Later, when Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters take out a wedding license, they have a fight in front of the very courtroom where he's tried for her murder. The use of the echo in narrative is certainly clear in The Human Stain in the scene when Coleman says to the lawyer, "I never want to see your lily-white face again," and then later in the film when his brother says the same thing to Nathan. In a sense, it's like a sound flashback from earlier, so when you hear it, you realize he's been carrying this burden his entire life. For me, the things that Philip Roth drops throughout the book that get echoed time and time again add a kind of depth and weight to the narrative. A good storyteller doesn't just race through narrative. You go with the speed, but you also stop and look at the landscape around you.

[Pubrick]

ayo, i havn't seen this and most likely never will. i just saw a clip from it with JACINDA BARRETT.... does anyone else remember her from The Real World London?? man that was one of the best seasons, she was a model back then. originally from my little town. i guess no one noticed or else it would hav been talked about already!

[edison]

Yeah, i noticed her when i saw it.

oh yeah, and shes naked in the film.