The Human Stain

A review from The Movie Snob:

The Human Stain. (C) This is a difficult movie to review because it contains several twists and turns that the moviegoer will prefer to learn about only by watching the movie and not by reading a review. I will comment, however, on the one aspect of the movie that everyone should already know about before he or she walks into the theater, which is that the characters played by stars Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman get romantically involved. I wasn’t buying it. He’s a 70ish college professor of classics, and she’s a (gorgeous) 34-year-old janitor at the same college, and she seems to be only semi-literate to boot. Although Hopkins’s attraction to her is believable (after all, she is Nicole Kidman, and he is a living male human being), the love story is not, and the “ick” factor is high. Moreover, although the twists and turns in the movie’s plot are interesting in the abstract, they are not compellingly translated onto the screen. Average at best.