Former SS Guard Seeks Redemption Through Affair With 15-Year-Old Boy  'The Reader' Review

Rating: 9/10 (17 February 2009)

The Nazi Holocaust is one of the most popular subjects tackled in film, although it is worth mentioning that it is a topic that has almost never turned out a bad movie. Jakob the Liar, despite being an outstanding film, was not so well received popularly, although it's an exception to the rule. Movies that approach the issue of the Holocaust are generally made by filmmakers who understand the importance and depth of the event, and are smart enough to respect it as such, and The Reader is no exception.
Directed by Stephen Daldry, who also gave us brilliant films like Billy Elliot and The Hours, it's an intricate analysis of the meaning and depth of guilt, and whether or not those who have been exposed to it and thus become infected by it are left with the option of redemption.
A young man named Michael Berg falls into a case of Scarlet Fever as a teenager while riding on a trolley car in West Berlin in 1958. He gets off, overcome with nausea, and is sick in the street and pretty much helpless until a woman comes to his aid, helping him home. After being bedridden for months, he seeks her out to thank her for her help, and the two begin an affair despite a significant age difference. The affair is brief but is also Michael's first sexual experience, so he attaches great importance to her. While they are seeing each other, Michael brings over books and reads literature to her between their love-making sessions, and the two grow closer and closer until one day she vanishes without a trace or even a word.
Michael learns nothing of her until nearly a decade later when, as a law student, he sees her in the courtroom being tried for her participation in the Nazi holocaust. She had joined the SS as a young woman and ultimately ended up participating in an event that left 300 Jews dead in a burning church.
The story is told through the eyes of Michael's older self, played by Ralph Fiennes, and the movie is told through a series of lengthy flashbacks. It's a brilliant approach that allows us to see through Fiennes' outstanding performance the depth of the affect that Michael's involvement with Hanna has had on his life.
Michael is put in a terrible position for a young man. He is at one point aware of information about Hanna that could severely alter a case that is obviously being built to frame her for deeds that she could not possibly have done, but he is torn by his emotional connection to her and his horror at discovering the darkness of her past. To speak out what he knows would have a tremendous impact on the rest of her life, but would also approach all kinds of philosophical questions that he doesn't appear ready to deal with, and would also have unknown but probably extensive affects on his own life as well.
The movie is based on a book I haven't read, but my understanding is that the movie doesn't show all of the same nuances and depth that is revealed in the book, which is sort of like saying the meal you get served at a restaurant doesn't look like the picture you saw in the magazine. Of course a movie can't stay perfectly faithful to a book, but The Reader clearly gets the important meaning across, although the last third at some points feels like it's being rushed along. The first hour of the film is pretty powerful, but it leaves a feel that the movie thinks it's told most of its story by the end and should kind of hurry things along.
Nevertheless, I appreciate that even though it presents as one of its main characters a woman who participated in sending Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz, it neither demonizes her nor does it attempt to absolve her of her past and ask us to root for her freedom. She has committed atrocious acts that have been buried for years, and the movie supports the theory that people who do such things should not be allowed a clean slate just by the realization and acceptance that what they did was wrong.
But don't worry, I didn't just spoil anything about the plot, because this is not a legal thriller. It's a moral drama with two main characters who are in two very different but very deep kinds of distress, and it is how they handle that distress that pushes the story along and makes it work. It's a story about the real world that takes place in the real world, not a story about the real world that takes place in Hollywood.
Had it been the latter, it would have been a very, very different movie which, by the way, would never have been nominated for any Oscars. Isn't it strange how that works?