The Reader

Beautiful and heart-breaking, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader accomplishes what a lot of recent films dealing with the Holocaust and its consequences haven’t been able to do. It manages to be compelling without making the mistake of thinking that the theme alone should be enough to make it worthy of praise. In recent years, we’ve gotten Fateless, which was curiously unfocused, and The Counterfeiters, a wildly overrated movie that won the Best Foreign Film Academy Award at last year’s Oscar ceremony. There’s a tendency to think that when a film deals with a subject as moving and devastating as the Holocaust it must automatically be good, and that’s a severe mistake: no matter what topic it covers, a drama needs to have a cohesive plot and solid performances to be considered good, and it has to do a thousand times more than that to be considered great. The Reader works wonderfully because there’s no feeling of over-ambition, and all it uses the Holocaust for is to add a nice helping of dramatic potency to its story.

The film is divided into three main acts, the first of which is set in 1958 Germany and depicts the secret love affair between Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a former Nazi guard, and teenager Michael Berg (David Kross). The second act takes place a few years later, when Hanna is accused for her involvement in the extermination of Jews during her days as a member of the S.S.; at this point, her relationship with Michael has been long over, but their paths cross again because Michael, now a law student, is one of the few pupils in an elite course that allows him to sit in on this trial, in which Hanna and several other Nazi guards are being charged. The third and last act is set in the 1980s, with an adult Michael (played by Ralph Fiennes), and obviously, an even older Hanna (still played by Winslet, with some heavy make-up work), but revealing more about this final act would force me to move into spoiler territory.

The Reader’s first segment is nothing short of great filmmaking. The sense of awkwardness and inappropriateness that the audience would normally feel from watching such an intensely sexual relationship between an adult woman and a teenaged boy is overshadowed here by a mixture of heartwarming tenderness and palpable sexual tension: the scenes are intensely romantic without being manipulative, and they are also sexy without being pornographic, which is certainly a credit to the fearlessness of both Kross and Winslet. As much as one tries to appreciate individual movies for the particular plot lines they follow, nearly everyone has a particular “type of movie” that they gravitate towards, and so, there’s no shame for me in admitting that I would’ve possibly given The Reader a 10 if it had expanded its first act into a full-length motion picture, but hey, that’s not what the filmmakers were going for here, and the movie is certainly not ruined by anything that happens in what comes after this first act.

The sequences featuring the trial are definitely the toughest to watch. Winslet does the impossible: she makes you feel tons and tons of sympathy for a former Nazi. Granted, it helps that the film doesn’t feature any flashbacks to the things she actually did, but one can’t help cringing as we witness Hanna sinking herself with her answers to the judge’s questions, and the moments are even more heart-breaking as they cut to Michael watching helplessly. The film’s “twist” of sorts is revealed during this second act, but to be honest, if you were paying attention during the early scenes, you’ll totally know what it is; however, it’s a nice touch because of the way it’s incorporated into the event that ultimately determines the trial’s outcome. As is so often the case, pride gets in the way of honesty, even in a case in which honesty may have actually been helpful – this is just one of the reasons why The Reader is such a successfully complex and well-made film.

Some may argue it, but I feel that the film’s last act is definitely the weakest. Yes, Winslet is still great under all the make-up in her final scenes, but I feel that this would’ve worked much better as a shorter epilogue than as a sizable segment of the movie. Several scenes involving adult Michael are drawn out, and the sort-of subplot involving his daughter and his divorce are entirely unnecessary. I wonder if the fact that Winslet isn’t in this last act as much as she is in the others is the “reason” why she has, inexplicably, been lumped into the supporting role for this film. Seriously? Hanna and Michael are both main characters, and Winslet should be getting lead actress billing. Then again, if she were, it would make my choice of preference for the best lead actress of the year even more difficult (and it currently is already hard enough as it is, with Anne Hathaway, Melissa Leo and Meryl Streep), so in a way, it’s a good thing, I guess. This is Winslet’s best work since her breath-taking performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and if she doesn’t finally win her overdue Oscar, a great injustice will have been done. I was slightly critical of her acting in this year's Revolutionary Road, not at all because it was bad, but because I didn’t feel she was always on-par with her co-star, but in The Reader, she outshines everyone and everything, and I more than forgive her for any nitpicks I had with her work in the other film. Kross is solid as Michael, bringing a youthful brilliance to his role in the early scenes (and he’s equally as comfortable with nudity as Winslet is) and a deep emotional punch to the trial scenes. Only Fiennes, who did much better work in The Duchess this year, falters slightly as the adult Michael, though that’s probably due more to the film’s wandering nature towards the end.

Carried by Winslet's mesmerizing performance, The Reader is an impressive piece of cinema that works on several levels, as a romance that is both raw and beautiful (if unorthodox), and also as a heart-racing court drama. On a similar line as Boy A, one of 2008's best, Daldry's film features a character who was either fully or partially responsible for a heinous crime and seeks to live a normal life after the fact. Films like that can work only if they achieve the difficult task of getting the audience to feel for the character who committed the misdeed, and surprising as it may sound, The Reader largely succeeds at that.

7/10