So it is possible to make a bad film about the Holocaust

Rating: 5/10 (6 February 2009)

The last three decades have seen a number of films on the subject of the Holocaust, including some very good ones. I can think of two masterpieces (Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and Polanski's "The Pianist") and one near-masterpiece (Pakula's "Sophie's Choice"). The recent "Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" is no masterpiece, but it does at least occasionally bring some fresh insights to its grim subject-matter.
"The Reader", by contrast, shows that it is possible to make a bad film about the Holocaust. In the early scenes, in fact, it does not seem like a Holocaust film at all, more like a German version of "The Graduate". In the West Germany of the late fifties Michael, a teenage schoolboy, meets, and is seduced by Hanna, a thirty-something tram conductress. The film's title derives from the fact that, after their love-making sessions, Hanna likes Michael to read to her, normally from literary classics. It eventually becomes clear that Hanna herself is illiterate and therefore unable to read these books for herself.
We next meet Michael several years later as a law student in his early twenties. As part of his studies he attends a war crimes trial. Several female prison camp guards are being tried for their part in an incident in which a group of Jewish prisoners were burned to death after the church in which they were sheltering was bombed. It is alleged that the guards failed to unlock the doors to allow the prisoners to escape. To Michael's horror he recognises Hanna as one of the defendants.
Of the three main actors I thought that the best was young David Kross, who plays Michael in his teens and twenties. The older Michael (from his thirties onwards) is played by the 46-year-old Ralph Fiennes, which rather alarmingly suggests that Michael has aged by about thirty years in the space of a decade between the mid-sixties and mid-seventies. Fiennes always seems rather too gloomy and saturnine, and this is not one of his best performances, certainly not as good as the one he gave in another film from last year, "The Duchess".
Kate Winslet's Golden Globe has aroused some controversy because it was given in the "Best Supporting Actress" category, thus allowing her to be nominated for, and win, another Golden Globe for "Best Actress", this time for "Revolutionary Road". There seems little point in having separate "supporting" categories if the system can be manipulated to allow actors to be nominated for leading roles. In the case of "The Reader" the role of Hanna is obviously a leading one; indeed, given that the role of Michael is divided between two different actors, it is the biggest one in the film.
Technically, Winslet's performance is a good one, and she copes well with the difficult challenge of playing the same character as a relatively young woman, as a middle-aged one and as an elderly one. On an emotional as opposed to a technical level, however, I found it an empty one. There is no sense of any inner life, of why Hanna behaves as she does. Neither Winslet nor the script ever makes it clear why Hanna volunteers to work as a concentration camp guard or why she seduces a teenage schoolboy. There is nothing to explain her extraordinary demeanour at the trial where (unlike her co-defendants) she freely admits her crimes, without it ever being made clear whether she does so in a spirit of contrition or of defiance. Hanna even claims, falsely, to have written the official report into the deaths of the prisoners, thereby persuading the Judge that she was in command and leading to her receiving a heavier sentence than the other defendants. In fact, Hanna's illiteracy means that she could not possibly have written the report, but she refuses to mention this fact to the court. Again, no explanation is given, except possibly that she regarded illiteracy as being a greater stigma than being convicted as a war criminal.
There is a similar emptiness at the heart of the film itself. Because of the enormity of their subject-matter, films about the Holocaust need to make an important statement about the human condition if they are to avoid the charge of exploiting suffering for the sake of sensation. There is nothing in "The Reader" which helps explain why the Holocaust took place or why seemingly ordinary people like Hanna took part in it so enthusiastically, and nothing of any significance about post-war Germany's attempts to come to terms with its past. There is some good acting, especially from Kross, and director Stephen Daldry invests the film with a suitably wintry bleakness. Intellectually and spiritually, however, this is an empty, barren film. 5/10