The Human Stain

Most of the movies nowadays are based on books. Personally, I prefer the books. You just have to read The Notebook and a Walk to Remember before watching them. When you read a book, you start painting pictures of charcters in your mind.

The Human Stain was a good movie based on a great book.



The book is loosely based on the life of Anatole Broyard, a Creole ( mixed race) literary critic. When he started his career after World War 2, he decided to "pass" as white. After his death, his race was questioned in many articles. This encouraged his daughter to trace her roots back to West Africa.

The book is about Coleman Silk, a professor of Classics at a fictitious university in Massachessets. At first, we knew nothing of his background , he was just your average Jewish-American man. Earlier in the movie, he is accussed of using a racial slur and because of that, he quits his job.
The movie is narratted by Nathan Zuckerman, his close friend who ends up writing his story. Then the flashbacks start, we are introduced to his family. His mother had an affair with a white men and he was the product, a green/blue-eyed very light-skinned Colored man.

Silk just chose the easy way out, all he had to do is check white on applications.

He chose to live a lie his whole life.


nterestingly, it was played by WentWorth Miller, an American of Syrian,Jamaican, African American, Lebanese, Somali, Russian and German heritage. He describes his father as black and his mother as white.

In 1994, Miller was a student at Princeton. He published a cartoon in the Daily Princetonian. The cartoon was misunderstood and he was accussed of being a racist. Interestingly, he didn't use the race card to explain this misunderstanding.