Review: The Reader (2009)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                           THE READER
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: In the 1950s a German teenager has an
     affair with an older woman.  Later, when the woman
     is on trial for wartime crimes, her former lover
     realizes that she has a secret shame than runs
     deeper than that of the crimes of which she is
     accused.  Revealing the secret would lessen her
     punishment.  This is a powerful drama touching on
     German guilt and responsibility, but also about a
     humiliation is greater still and shapes a woman's
     life.  Kate Winslet reveals herself to be a much
     more versatile actress than we could have suspected
     before.  Stephen Daldry directs a screenplay by
     David Hare based on the book by Bernhard Schlink.
     Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

(It is impossible to discuss this film without revealing an
important plot twist.  There are minor spoilers throughout and a
spoiler paragraph after the main review.)

The story is told mostly in flashback as a lawyer Michael Berg
(played by Ralph Fiennes) thinks about his life.  In the late 1950s
a teenage Michael (David Kross) becomes very ill and takes refuge
by the door of what turns out to be a tram conductor, Hanna Schmitz
(Kate Winslet).  She shows him some kindness and he becomes
obsessed with her.  The relationship blooms into passion,
explicitly portrayed.  But she chooses a peculiar sort of foreplay.
She wants her lover to read aloud to her.  Having people read to
her becomes an obsession.  The desire for readers goes the very
core of who she is.  Eight years later Michael's path crosses
Hanna's again.  Hanna is on trial for her crimes as an SS guard at
Auschwitz and elsewhere.  Michael will make a deduction that casts
all of Hanna's strange behavior in a new light.  Michael may be the
main character, but the viewer's eye throughout is on Hanna.  In
spite of the leads being played by two good actors, Michael is a
character we have seen before and who in the first two of the three
sections of this film is more acted upon than he is acting.  The
film seems intended to be about Michael and a moral decision that
he is forced to make.  But Hanna pulls our attention so strongly
that what should be the central moral issue is just demoted to a
plot turn.  The film as it was made is now really about Hanna and
how she could be the person that she is.  Her character cannot
elicit much sympathy from the audience, but she can come to be
understood.

Acting honors have to go to Kate Winslet.  Even in a year in which
she is being touted for her acting in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD her
Academy Award nomination is for this film, and for once I agree
with the Academy voters.  She not only has to convincingly play a
German woman (okay, she does it in English with a German accent),
but she has to play the woman as she ages over several decades and
is uniformly credible at each age.  The film also has Bruno Ganz as
a law professor.  Ganz may be the best actor that Germany has had
since it lost Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt.  Ralph Fiennes is
quietly professional as a man totally bottled up within himself.
He is completely believable, but his role is just not very
compelling.  Perhaps the same can be said of David Kross playing
the same character at a younger age.  Lina Olin is along in a
double role as mother and daughter involved in the trial.

One touch that we have not seen much before is the ferocity with
which the generation after the war turned against their parents'
generation.  They see the Holocaust as a crime against their own
country and want to disassociate themselves violently from their
parents' actions.  Films like ZENTROPA dramatize the undercurrent
of secret loyalty to the principles of the Third Reich after the
war.  This film shows us that much of the next German generation
turned on an older Germans who could commit such brutal crimes.

At heart what makes the film powerful is Winslet in so strong a
performance and so totally different from anything she has done in
the past.  I rate THE READER a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.

SPOILER WARNING:

Somehow there is an uneasy feeling about the point of view of this
film.  Much of the point of the film is that Hanna is treated
unjustly by the system of war crimes justice.  And while we are
watching the film we feel for her.  Because we have come to know
her we feel that she deserves a lighter punishment.  But at the
same time she is getting a lenient punishment for her actual
actions.  The implication is that if others get punishment that is
lighter than they deserve, she should also get a punishment that is
too light.  At heart this film is about a case of sympathy for the
devil.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0976051/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10009498-reader/>

					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper