Naked Kate Winslet - good! A "you've got to be kidding me" plot twist - bad!

Rating: 4/10 (8 October 2010)

This movie might be a lot better than I think it is. It's a good, if somewhat unexceptional, right up until a big revelation. That's clearly supposed to be a moment when the film is striving for deep emotional significance. But at that moment all I could think was "You've got to be kidding me". If that moment works for you, you might believe The Reader is a great story. It didn't work for me and I was left sitting in the theater, noticing what a skewed moral center this movie has.
The Reader is about the responsibility and guilt that Germany as a whole and for all time bears for the Holocaust. The looking glass it uses to examine that concept is the relationship between Michael Berg (David Kross) and Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). In Berlin in 1958, Michael is 15 years old and falls into a torrid affair for a summer with Hanna, a woman twice his age. They have a lot of sex and Hanna has Michael read to her constantly. Then Michael begins to feel the tug of girls his own age, and Hanna abandons him for a reason all her own. Jumping forward to the late 60s, Michael is in law school and his professor takes him to see the trial of 6 Nazis prison camp guards. The 6 defendants are accused of letting 298 Jews burn to death in a fire. One of the defendants is Hanna. And no, the story is not about Hanna being wrongfully accused. She was a Nazi and she did let those Jews burn to death. But Hanna has a secret. It is one she is so desperate to keep that she'll willingly accept most of the blame for the massacre. Michael figures out her secret, but lets her be severely punished without saying a word. Then the film jumps forward again a decade or so, with Michael (Ralph Fiennes) now a divorcée with a young daughter who reconnects with Hanna in prison. He sends her cassette tapes of him reading the same books he read to her as a young man. The final fate of Hanna and Michael leads to one of the strangest scenes I've ever encountered, where a character in the film essentially tells the people watching the film that what they've been watching really has no significance.
I don't think this is a great movie. I believe the only reasons it's been called great and received a nomination for Best Picture is because of the secret I mentioned before. That, and Kate Winslet being almost perpetually naked in it. I don't want to give the secret away, but let me describe it in a fashion that might help you understand why the secret actually ruined the film for me. The people who made The Reader have essentially taken a Holocaust movie and melded it together with an Afterschool Special. No, I'm not joking.
I rather enjoyed The Reader as a fairly pedestrian coming-of-age movie right up until the big revelation, largely because of Winslet's plentiful nudity. But after the big revelation, I sat in the theater and felt nothing but annoyance for the rest of the film. Hanna is a mass murderer and compared to that, her secret is petty and pathetic. Yet this movie fails to recognize or accept the vast emotional, moral and intellectual chasm between the two. That Hanna thinks her secret is worse and more embarrassing than being a mass murder is, I guess, supposed to make her more sympathetically human.
However, I am utterly uninterested in feeling sympathy for a mass murdering Nazi and I don't think there's anything wrong with taking that stance. But beyond even that, Hanna thinking her secret is more shameful than being responsible for nearly 300 people burning to death is incontrovertible evidence that she is massively disturbedand the story NEVER acknowledges that. The Reader wants to treat Hanna's situation as this great personal crisis, but it's only a crisis because she's a deeply dysfunctional weirdo. By refusing to acknowledge how odd Hanna is, the film left me unable to accept anything else it was trying to do.
There was another film in 2008 that deserved the Best Picture nomination that went to The Reader. It's time for Hollywood to realize that just because a movie is serious and somber and about the Holocaust, that doesn't automatically make it a great film.