Review: The Reader
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The Reader reunties the creative team behind The Hours – Director Stephen Daldry with screenwriter David Hare. I thought Michael Cunningham’s stunning novel couldn’t be filmed, so I ate my words shortly after I shuffled out of the cinema, blinking back the tears, gushing at the remarkable achievement. I went to The Reader with different expectation, as I found the 1995 novel by law professor Bernhard Schlink necessarily cold and troubling – stimulating moral questions rather than any emotional ones. In David Hare’s words :
Schlink’s singular achievement ..(is) to invent a narrative that finally articulated the dilemma of so many Germans who were born, through no fault of their own, as the children of a great crime. How does a succeeding generation deal with the transgressions of their parents? How do they find a way of living anything like a normal life? The Reader is not simply a novel specific to the postwar German experience. It is also a more far-reaching exploration of the painful and difficult process we all now know under the name of truth and reconciliation.
So, serious issues and difficult filmic material await. The film opens in a morning in 1995, when lawyer Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) mutters goodbye to woman who has spent the night. Clearly she has found him cold and aloof, and we flashback to 1958 to find the root of this emotional stuntedness.
*plot spoilers ahead* When 15 year old Michael (excellent young German actor David Kross) vomits in front of tram-worker Hanna Schmitz’s (Kate Winslet) appartment, she takes pity on on him and walks the feverish young boy back to his affluent home. Three months later when he has recovered from scarlet fever, and at the behest of his mother, he returns to thank her… and at this point Hanna Schmizt, over twice his age, seduces him. Young Michael is depicted as eager and willing thoughout, delighted by the initiation Hanna is offering him – and as there are so many other other morality issues going on in this film, the question of whether this sexual relationship was abusive becuase of the age imbalance is not at the forefront of the film. (suffice to say, it caused young Michael life-long emotional turmoil for a mutiplicity of reasons)
With puppy-like enthusiasm, Michael trots to Hanna’s appartment regularly after school, they have sex and then he reads to her, until she decides they’ll do it the other way around. Young Michael reads schoolbooks, plays and novels aloud – The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterly’s Lover – much to the pleasure of Hanna, whom we later discover is illiterate. After a lover’s tiff, Hanna disappears abruptly. The next time Michael encounters her is 1966, by which stage he is a law student observing the Holocaust War Trials. At this point he discovers the atrocities that Hanna has committed – which include locking 30 Jewish women inside a church and allowing them burn to death. At this point it also dawns on Michael that Hanna is illiterate, and tht she is so shameful of the fact she is concealing it, despite being framed by her co-accused as report-writer and therefore leader and instigator of the atrocities. Michael wrestles with this vital piece of evidence: Should he reveal it, and allow Hanna be charged with the lesser crime? Or is her unquestioning compliance with such murder and cruelty so repugnant that she deserves to be locked away for life regardless? He stays quiet, and is racked with guilt.
A decade later, still guilty and with a broken marriage, Michael begins recording books for Hanna on a cassette deck, and posts them to her in prison. When she receives them, her only contact from the outside world, she teaches herself to read and write. I’ll stop here, to leave plenty of plot for those who haven’t seen it or read it. The complex layers of guilt and shame continue and Daldry/Hare try to stay true to the book’s original intent, which was to offer no possiblity of redemption or forgiveness for the crimes committed. As David Hare states:
Schlink makes it plain, both in his writing and in private conversation, that no writer of whatever background, portraying the crimes of the German people, has the moral right to extend to his characters any possibility of redemption. For that reason, anyone whose unlikely response to the book is to want to make a film of it faces an unusual challenge. The conventional Hollywood narrative always ends in the hero coming to some understanding of his own flaws. Uplift, you may say, is built into the contract. But Hanna, at the author’s own insistence, reaches no real understanding of what she has done. You may even argue that no understanding of such extreme crimes is even possible. How, then, was anyone to embark on a movie in which one of the two principal characters essentially learns nothing?
The performances are universally excellent, with all the minor parts being played by German actors. Somewhat ironically a key difficulty with the film, and perhaps a failure of the film-makers, lies in the casting of the lead roles and the beauty of the cinematography. At times the ‘love story’ utterly dominates and overshadows. Kate Winslet gives an understated performance -seriously- though I realise anyone who saw her Golden Globe acceptance speeches may not believe me, but as far as I remember she smiles ONCE in the film, and most of the time her tone is gruff and businesslike when instructing her young lover (whom she calls ‘kid’ throughout) to read or take off his clothes. But even when scowling, she has a screen presence that is utterly luminous. As their affair was pure passion, most of the time the lovers are naked, and the sex is explicitly and lovingly filmed. Hanna is transformed into a sympathetic character, by dint of the fact that clothed/unclothed Kate Winslet exudes beauty and pain - and no grimacing, cold lighting or sombre soudtrack can offset it. It is a Holocaust film where the horrors of the concentration camps are what you hold in your head from books or other powerful films (Schindler’s List or The Pianist) Unlike these films, IMDB have classified The Reader as Drama/Romance/Thriller/War… in some ways it’s a discomforting case of take your pick. Ultimately it’s worth going to in order to attempt to address these complex moral questions yourself, as clearly the film-makers intended, and be challenged or frustrated. At times it is clear that the film is struggling be true to the novel, more Berlin than Hollywood, and much though I respect Kate Winslet and tolerate Ralph Fiennes, wouldn’t an all-German cast have served their intent better? Ah but that’s not how film financing works!
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Absolutely heartbreaking movie, I felt quite shaken after it.
[...] challenging films and rarely hits a wrong note! She’s having a great year, between this and The Reader and is nominated for an Oscar for the latter- her sixth Academy Award nomination so maybe this [...]