The Reader

Why are Anglo-Americans making films about Germany’s collective shame over the Holocaust? And why now? No doubt it’s entirely coincidental that The Reader comes hot on the heels of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and just a few weeks before Tom Cruise plays a sympathetic German officer in Valkyrie. At a pinch we could throw in Defiance too (released next week), another WWII story, this time about Jewish resistance – such as it was.

I have a feeling that the international success of the 2004 German film Downfall (with Bruno Ganz as Hitler), and before it, the 2002 documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary has something to do with it. Like the German films, the Hollywood movies ask if turning a blind eye to evil constitutes complicity and whether we would have done any different in the circumstances? Further, can there be forgiveness, or even redemption, for those stained by this guilt?

I don’t know if these recurring questions reflect moral qualms about Anglo-American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or not, but either way The Reader seems designed to fudge the issue.

To be generous, I suppose one man’s fudge is another’s moral nuance. The Reader is a love story of sorts, unfolding in two long flashbacks. In 1958, 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) falls into an erotic affair with an older woman, tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). She is his first love, and after a while they fall into a routine. He hurries to her apartment after school and they make love. But first he reads to her: Chekov, Tolstoy, Twain, the voluminous literary classics he studies in school.

The relationship ends abruptly. Their paths cross again unexpectedly in 1966, when the young law student is appalled to learn the truth of Hanna’s involvement with the SS during the war.

These events (and a shorter third episode) are ruminated over by Michael as an older man – now played by Ralph Fiennes. Is it possible to love someone who has behaved with grotesque inhumanity… To forgive them… At what cost to your own conscience?

Adapting Bernhard Schlink’s novel, The Hours writer and director team David Hare and Stephen Daldry have made another sober, serious, literary melodrama spanning several decades.

I haven’t read the book, but for me, the film didn’t really work, although it’s beautifully made and acted with some skill. Winslet’s actressy performance takes a while to transcend its mannerisms: the curt Dietrich-like way she calls Michael “Kid”, her flat-footed, working class gait – more of a clump than a walk. The first, longest flashback is the most effective, but the affair between an older woman and a snotty nosed kid is not exactly virgin territory, and I never quite believed Hanna’s passion for literature. Would we think less of her if she prevailed on her lover to read Mills & Boone?

I won’t give away details of the 1960s episode, but it hinges on a dilemma that struck this viewer as phony and self-serving. It simultaneously (spuriously, in my opinion) mitigates Hanna’s guilt and puts adjudication in Michael’s hands.

Perhaps the novel offers insights that haven’t translated to the screen, but the movie becomes less interesting as it goes on, in part because Michael himself remains an opaque and infuriating figure.

Packaged with sensitivity and skill, The Reader will impress those with a certain book club mentality. But anyone truly interested in the legacy of the Nazi era would be much better advised to check out any number of films from the 1970s by the prodigious German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Marriage of Maria Braun; Lola; Veronika Voss. Daldry’s hollow movie offers a gloss on the Holocaust.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com