It's 1998. Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a Jewish classics professor at Athena College. He comments that two students are spooks for missing class. It turns out that they're black and complains are filed about its racist connotation. Coleman is incensed and his wife dies from the stress. He hires fiction writer Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) to write about his life. He recalls his early life (Wentworth Miller) and his love Steena Paulsson (Jacinda Barrett). He starts having a fling with a much younger Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman). Her ex-husband Lester Farley (Ed Harris) is unstable and stalking her. Coleman's lawyer Nelson Primus (Clark Gregg) tries to talk him out of his relationship.

This struggles to gather any speed. The Hopkins Kidman romance holds the potential of something compelling. Based on the novel, this movie is all about the secret. I'm willing to swallow Hopkins' casting. The flashback to Wentworth Miller is problematic. It stalls the movie every time. It also reveals the secret right away which lessens any shock value. The flashbacks should be pushed further back in the film so that his rejections in both time periods happen at the same time. There is a passionate affair at the center but all around it, the movie keeps working to drain away the tension.

The dean and professor Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) uses the word 'spooks' as a reference to two unknown students who never comes to his classes, and their families sue the university, using the racist connotation of this English word. Coleman quits his position and his wife does not resist to the malicious lying and dies. Alone, Coleman becomes friend of the eremite writer and novelist Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise),who lives isolated nearby a lake. Meanwhile, Coleman meets Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman),a thirty-four years old suffered divorced woman, who lost her two children in a fire, and he falls in love with her. They disclose innermost secrets to each other, while Faunia is besieged and threatened by her former husband, the deranged Vietnam veteran Lester Farley (Ed Harris). 'The Human Stain' is a beautiful and sensitive movie about racism, intolerance and prejudice, having a great direction and a magnificent performance of the excellent cast, highlighting Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise. The soundtrack and the photography are also wonderful and Nicole Kidman is gorgeous as usual. And may this is the greatest flaw in the script, since I believe any man in the world would fall in love for her, and the reasons why Coleman has a crush on her mixes with her astonishing condition of a gorgeous woman. It is very difficult to isolate her performance, as an outstanding actress in the role of a troubled character, from her beauty. Anyway, the movie is wonderful, very sensitive and touching and I highly recommend it. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil) 'Revelações' ('Revelations')

Well, talk about movie twists! This one didn't wait until the end of the picture to reveal that Anthony Hopkins' character was a black man who had turned his back on his roots to garner success as an educator and dean of fictional Athena College in the equally fictional town of Athena, Massachusetts. I'm not certain about how I'm to react to that bit of information. Story wise it becomes a compelling element when we first learn that Coleman Silk (Hopkins) is called on the carpet and loses his job over a politically incorrect remark taken as overt racism. In a different picture, he could have sued the pants off the college and probably come away with a bundle with the help of a competent lawyer. Instead he takes a more destructive path by hooking up with one of the local trailer trash citizens named Faunia Farley. Even in her flaunty attire or working class janitor uniform, it's a tough sell making Kidman look any less glam than she really is, so that part of the picture required a good suspension of disbelief. But not as much as her taking up with Hopkins' character who was easily twice her age, whether the relationship was one of a sympathetic nature or not. It might have been better to substitute the high profile celebrities in this film with those of lesser name recognition, since the entire exercise becomes one of wondering how in the heck any of this could possibly happen. This was one of those pictures I talked myself into a lower rating than what I was originally going to give it just because of the incongruity of it all.