The Reader, based on Bernard Schlink's novel of the same name, is the second literary adaptation Kate Winslet has appeared in over the last year and for which she has won numerous awards which recognise her performance as a Nazi war criminal. In this movie she is far more impressive than as April in Revolutionary Road: unusually for Winslet her performance is muted and restrained; she appears to have shed her characteristic theatricality for something far more enigmatic, and it really works. Winslet stars as Hanna, a bus conductor who provides David Kross's Michael with his sexual awakening in 1950s Germany. Twice his age, the relationship is far from conventional and the remote Hanna hides many secrets. She adores being read to, refusing to read herself, and their relationship meanders along in a quietly erotic blend of reading and sex, until one day she disappears. The film's tripartite structure moves between this period, Michael's experiences as a law student and subsequent discovery of Hanna's past, and his reunion with an aged Hanna as a successful but unhappy lawyer (played by a typically distant Ralph Fiennes) in his mid 50s.
This movie deals with the huge legacy of guilt Germany faced following the Holocaust and stirs up many nagging questions about personal responsibility and shame. Winslet is exceptional as Hanna, having accepted the role after Nicole Kidman was unable to commit to the project, and the rest of the cast are equally well chosen. Bruno Ganz as Michael's university lecturer brings with him additional, external layers of meaning: having played Hitler in Downfallhe is burdened with a sense of direct culpability for his generation, as his character helps his students understand the relationship between morality and law. Fiennes' role in Schindler's List also overshadows proceedings, as we see him here as quite the opposite - a victim, scarred forever by his relationship with Hanna. Quite rightly, Hanna is not given the opportunity to explain away her actions, but presents us with a paradox; a woman who can cry over literary tragedies, yet presided over Nazi death camps. We meet her first as a lover, and this is a clever way of structuring the story: we, like Michael, have to reconcile this woman with her past actions, which forces us to consider anew what evil is and our own relationship to it.
In spite of Hanna's effect on Michael, the movie is definitively not couched as a tragedy for him - that would be far too facile and insensitive for a film like this. There are no moments where you feel the makers are exploiting its audience's emotions, unlike so many films about the Holocaust. Instead The Reader is an intellectual, very pragmatic offering, both compelling and challenging. Its themes are complex and the cast do them justice. My only real gripe was the German-inflected accents used in this English-speaking movie. For such an intelligent film, it showed little awareness that its audience were capable of buying into Kate Winslet as a German without actually sounding German. OK so it was hardly 'Allo 'Allo bad, but even so ... The same paradoxical pedantry distracted me in Stephen Daldry's earlier project The Hours, courtesy of Nicole Kidman's enormous prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf. Still, at least Winslet's aging make up was better than the job they did on poor Julianne Moore in the other aforementioned film. And I don't want to linger too much on this as the movie is one of the most interesting and philosophical I've seen in a long time. Although the reading was principally there as a plot driver, it also serves to highlight the moral ineffectuality of the the arts. As other critics have noted, the movie certainly doesn't suggest that Hanna's actions would have differed had she been literate. Empathy is not what we think it is - reading and morality are seperate. A woman can cry over characters in a novel but still send people to their death. Ultimately, the arts are seen as somewhat morally redundant, the movie undercutting its own authority by pointing out the chasm between its presentation of an event and the actual effects of the event itself. A survivor states quite firmly to Michael that if he wants lessons, he should go to the theatre, not the camps. This is a devastating, bleakly ironic indictment of the movie's apparent purpose, and so we are left with the facts and nothing else. Perhaps this is too easy a get out when tackling such a topic, but I was impressed that Daldry acknowledges this.
The Reader really did grip me and made me think, provoking much conversation after watching, and continues to be hard to forget. It perhaps wisely provides no trite answers to its subject matter, but offers a devastating look at how a society attempts to come to terms with its past.
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