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THE READER Send This Review to a Friend
Although certainly well acted and engrossing from start to finish, “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare based on Bernhard Schlink’s book, leaves an unpleasant moral aftertaste because, while the focus is from the viewpoint of the male protagonist, the film asks us to have a misplaced measure of sympathy for a woman who turns out to have been a concentration camp guard who justifies her lethal complicity in slaughter.
This is a weird tale that also raises questions of believability. Not having read the book, I can only react to what’s on screen. I have talked with people who have read the book and based on that knowledge find things in the film that I do not. While there is an effort in the film to achieve suspense, this is one of those works impossible to discuss meaningfully without the specifics that may undercut the intended suspense for the moviegoer.
David Kross nicely plays a young impressionable Michael Berg in post World War II Germany. One day when he is a teenage student he becomes ill on the way home and is befriended by Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet. The kid lucks out. The older woman becomes hungry for him and the sex begins. He falls in love. The gimmick here is that Hanna gets pleasure out of her young lover reading incessantly to her. He realizes that she is illiterate. Their affair becomes what might be called sex and lit.
Cut to later when Michael is studying law in a seminar with a professor impressively played by Bruno Ganz. It seems unlikely that even a boy as impressionable as Michael, now morphing into Ralph Fiennes, would still carry the torch from this fleeting escapade into adulthood. When the professor takes his class to witness a war crimes trial, lo and behold, guess who is one of the women camp guards on trial. Michael is shattered by her crimes but could speak in her defense. Hanna doesn’t express the least bit of regret at the trial for the Jews burned to death because they were not released from a flaming building. In fact, she justifies not releasing them because the situation would have been chaotic. But one point on which there is injustice against her is that rather than admit she is illiterate, Hannah falsely admits to writing the report of the event, thereby drawing the stiffest sentence. Michael could have testified that she could not have written it.
The latter part of the film is devoted to how Michael takes some pity on her and begins to send her his taped readings of books while she is in prison, tapes that she uses to help her to learn to read and write. Without going into further plot details, it remains for Lena Olin as the daughter of a camp survivor (Olin also plays her mother at the trial) to give the film some moral perspective by telling Michael when he travels to see her in New York that illiteracy is no excuse for Hanna’s behavior.
Winslet to her credit sheds all vestiges of her vaunted beauty in the role to capture effectively the essence of her miserable character, and Fiennes gives a good performance as the tortured Michael split between his horror at Hanna’s complicity and his sympathy based on their sexual cavorting in his teenage days. I felt like saying to him, please, you just got lucky getting laid as a kid but with the wrong woman. Let it go. A Weinstein Company release.
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