"The Reader" Delivers the "Goods" That "Milk" Failed To Fake

Rating: 7/10 (4 February 2009)

When I went to see this curious combination of art-house sex romp and period mystery, it was playing on one screen in an 18 screen multiplex theater right next to "Milk." What irony.
I first took notice of "Milk," when I read that Gus Van Sant made Sean Penn and James Franco wear huge rubbery fake penises for "love" scenes and other nudity. I figured I would go see that, get the audience reaction, and see if I could keep from laughing and embarrassing myself. It's one thing to laugh out loud during Rambo IV when Stallone starts blowing apart the Burmese, but quite another to do the same in a theater (likely) full of many older, worldly gay men there to see a "serious" cinematic tribute for Harvey Milk.. After I read that all the "strap on" scenes were cut out, and that there was no honest depiction of the bath house debauchery the period was famous for, I skipped it.
I went into "The Reader," without having read the book, and not knowing much about it except that it dealt with Nazis, war criminals and sex. That was enough to interest me. Shades of "The Night Porter" maybe? Not really, but the penis had definitely moved over from next door, and it didn't look fake either. Completely flaccid (absolutely necessary to avoid an instant NC-17 tag), certainly not huge, but a realistically ample "shower." It was attached to a barely 18 year old little known German actor who looked like a brown haired version of Prince William fused with a lanky Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and who partook in quite a few of those slow, extended "European" type explicit sex scenes with 30something lead actress Kate Winslet, who also showed off almost all of her body except the beav. I was the only male in a sparse audience made up entirely of middle aged, and older women. The movie was not funny, but I did laugh quietly at the thought of the dilemma this might pose for many of the gay men next door if they really knew what was going on so close by.
I also laughed a bit because the other Winslet flick, "Revolutionary Road" was playing just a couple of screens on down. Here a stiffly clothed Winslet gets two of the most incompetently mechanical screws in modern film. If "The Reader" is all about sexual fantasy fulfillment for "mature" straight women, "Road's" adaptation of Richard Yates' 1962 suburban "horror" novel is an explanation for why the Stepford men in Ira Levin's later horror tale turned all their women into programmed robots. It was the only way those 30 second wonders were ever going to give them an orgasm.
"The Reader," beyond its relaxed Eurosex themes, is also a lame thriller. Lame only because it isn't very thrilling. The secret of the story is very easy to spot early on. The core plot involved Kate Winslet and her brief, lusty 1958 relationship with the German youth, aged 15 to 16 then, and how their lives and interactions play out through 1995. Seems that before she became the cathartic lover of an impressionable and lonely teenage boy, Winslet's character was an SS guard at Auschwitz and other camps during the War, and she is charged and convicted in 1966 of commanding a unit of female guards in 1944 that killed around 300 Jewish prisoners by burning them alive in a church (a trademark act of Holocaust brutality) during the retreat from the camps as Soviet troops advance.
The decently hung German kid plays the male lead character both as a 16 year old, and as a 24 year old law student in 1966 during Winslet's trial. The 1958 scenes are lushly detailed period recreations, complete with bucolic and romantic "wandervogeling" between Winslet and her boy that vaguely evoke similar earlier scenes in "Cabaret." The scene involving the penile money shot is a lingering one where Winslet slowly bathes the youth's taut, naked body as he stands awkwardly inside a claw foot tub in her dingy flat. No, she can't scrub away her sins doing this, but it is gratuitous eye candy for a select audience, both watching it, and missing it in the theater next door.
The male lead as an older man is played by Ralph Fiennes, whose persona is so radically different from that of the younger actor that it's hard to suspend disbelief and accept the two as the same person. Fiennes does his usual; he whisks about in well tailored suits and looks consistently constipated, and sexually aloof. He is more like the duds Winslet is dealing with down the hall on Revolutionary Road than the shy, eager stud she bedded years earlier.
I am also a bit leery of the "good German" approach of the film. These Germans seem a bit too eager to prosecute their own kind for war crimes, but as "good" Germans will do, they justify their desire for justice with a lot of awkward, rambling philosophizing about the difference between morality and law. Just like they did years earlier when opportunists like Heidegger bastardized Nietzsche to justify acts they now admit are crimes. One thing this movie does well is it shows how it was mostly illiterate working class types, such as Winslet's character, who get what tepid justice is meted out, rather than say, a mayor, or Bundestag legislator, or some AG CEO or chairman, all of whom would likely go deliberately undiscovered and unpunished. Even at that, for someone convicted of "murdering" 300 Jews, and sentenced to life in prison, she's up for release within twenty years, and with all the tender support the state social services agencies can muster to help her readjust to life on the outside. Despite all the sex, and decent mounting of the historical periods this movie delivers, I still like "The Odessa File," and maybe "Marathon Man" better.