The Reader

Please note:  While I have kept the following review of The Reader as spoiler-free as possible, it does contain some substantial discussion of the film’s story-line.  Those of you who wish to know as little as possible about the movie before seeing it should proceed with caution.

OK, here we go:

The story of The Reader, adapted from the novel by Bernhard Schlink, takes place during several time periods.  We begin the story in 1995, when we are introduced to a middle-aged lawyer, Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), making a rather awkward, quiet breakfast for a woman (an apparent one-night stand).  We discover Michael’s past through a series of flashbacks, first to his youth in Germany in 1958.  As a boy of 15 (played by David Kross), he meets and quickly tumbles into a love affair with a much older woman, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet).  (This “sexual awakening” period of the story is attention-catching in that it contains a copious amount of nudity from both actors.)  Eventually, Hanna disappears, leaving young Michael heartbroken.  We rejoin Michael several years later when, as a law student in the 1960’s, he and several other students attend a war crimes trial.  One of the woman being charged is Hanna.  The movie continues from there, catching up with Michael at several other points in his life leading up to 1995.

As a showcase for fine acting, there is a lot to behold in The Reader.  Winslet is mysterious and beguiling in all of the various ages that she portrays.  Her Hanna is a somewhat desperate creature, haunted and alone, and we can understand why she latches on to young Michael.  As for Michael, David Kross is quite convincing as both the 15 year-old innocent in 1958 and also as the conflicted law student in the 60’s.  Both Kross and Winset should be commended for their bravery, as they do most of their most serious, emotional scenes in the nude (or the almost-nude).  Ralph Fiennes is also interesting as the older Michael, although he has less to do in the film than Winslet and Kross.  His Michael is rather impenetrable.  I suppose the intention is that Michael has become that way because of all that he went through in the flashbacks, although, as I’ll discuss in more detail in just a moment, I’m not quite convinced.  It is fascinating to see Fiennes portray a German man of entirely the opposite sort than the fierce, vicious Amon Goeth that he famously embodied in Schindler’s List.  

Despite these fine performances, though, The Reader is a frustrating film.  I am not entirely sure what it is trying to say.  It seems that its intention is to capture the way that modern Germans struggle with the legacy of the Holocaust, and that is an intriguing notion.  The portions of the film that most engaged me were the war crimes trial scenes, as those moments directly addressed complex issues of guilt and responsibility.  But I was left wondering, in the end, what message the film was attempting to convey.  Are we meant to have sympathy for Hanna, despite her past as a guard in Auschwitz, and her role (which she admits to in the trial) of allowing hundreds of Jewish prisoners to burn to death in one instance?  The way the film is structured, we do grow to like Hanna (at least somewhat) before we are confronted with her crime.  That was certainly intentional, to add weight to the scenes where we see her on trial.  Suddenly this isn’t a faceless German being accused of atrocities — it’s someone we know.  But while it is of course reasonable that not every member of the Nazi Party was quite as horrible a monster as the previously mentioned Goeth from Schindler’s List, I hardly think the film mounts too successful a defense of Hanna’s behavior.  (Is that a weakness of the film?  Well, I suppose only if that was the film’s intention — and I am not certain about that.  We’ll get back to this issue in a moment.)

The film also seems to use Michael’s plight as a way  to convey the struggles of modern Germans.  Empty and alone as an older man, Michael seems to be portrayed as, in many ways, another victim of Hanna’s.  But that just doesn’t track for me.  Should he have been awakened to the world of sexuality at such a young age as he was?  Certainly not.  And must his experiences attending Hanna’s trial have been very painful for him, because of his intimate connection to her, and also because of the knowledge he possesses that might sway her trial?  Certainly.  But none of that, for me, explains away the empty man Michael turns in to.  None of that offers sufficient justification for his apparent inability to be a good husband, or a good father to his daughter.  And if it is the film’s intention to suggest that we should consider Michael to be yet another victim of the Holocaust, as much as the survivor girl who he encounters at the trial and then again once more later in life, then I vehemently object to that notion.

Finally, I must express additional confusion by the revelation of Hanna’s secret.  (I will tread carefully here, to avoid completely spoiling the film for anyone.)  Hanna is sentenced more harshly than the other German women on trial, because of an accusation that she committed an act even worse than they did.  She does not deny this, even though she was not guilty, in order to hide a deeper secret about herself.  But this deep dark secret, is, to me, ludicrously mundane, and I cannot fathom why Hanna would rather be convicted than admit to it in court.  Any sympathy I might have had for Hanna about her fate (if any still existed after the revelations at the trial of the horrors she WAS involved with) is washed away by her refusal to reveal this one detail about herself.  

So, in the end, I am left with nothing but questions.  Now, to be clear, I am not arguing that any film that asks more difficult questions than it answers is a bad film.  Many of the best movies don’t wrap everything up in a nice little bow — they leave the audience to wonder and to make their own moral judgments about what they have seen.  But The Reader seems like a film that is crying out to make a statement — it’s just that, for me, whatever statement that may be is entirely muddled, and I am left wondering about the filmmakers’ intentions.  And if I am wrong — if the film has no grand statement to make — then I am no less satisfied.  Because then I am left with nothing more than the story of two unhappy people who made poor decisions throughout their lives, and any interest or connection I might have for or with them pales in comparison to the greater tragedies of the Holocaust.