One of the best films of 2008 that's utterly captivating - 88%

Rating: 9/10 (18 August 2009)

I've been let down before by DVDs that promised much but delivered very little, the most recent example being the decidedly average "Duplicity". Who hasn't? But honestly, I wasn't expecting much from this. Yes, Kate Winslet finally got her Best Actress nod from Oscar for her role but I was expecting another "Training Day" - a meaty and very talky drama with all the crying and monologues that Hollywood's finest could muster. But this is so much more than that. It's thought-provoking, emotive and full of the heartbreaking characterisation that typifies Stephen Daldry's work.
Berlin, 1995. A middle-aged Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) reminiscences about a long-ago love affair with a mysterious woman called Hanna Schmitz (Winslet). As the pair spend more time with each other, the young Michael (David Kross) finds himself reading to Hanna more and more before she strangely disappears, leaving him heart-broken. As the film progresses, Michael continues to remember the next time he saw Hanna - on trial for war crimes during the Second World War's Holocaust.
It may be too Oscar-friendly for some but both my new wife and I found "The Reader" to be a superb movie. Once the story begins, it's difficult to tear your eyes away from the screen as its loaded with so many talented and flawless performances that it is utterly believable. Winslet may have got the plaudits but Fiennes and Kross particularly are just as brilliant. What separates this from other war-based love stories is the rare opportunity to see the aftermath of conflict from the defeated side. Most Hollywood war films are excessively glamorised and heavily focused on the Allies. Mercifully, this isn't - it's dirty, grubby and anything but glamorous. The tipping point, for this viewer, came when Kross is walking between rows and rows of stolen shoes taken from Jews executed in the camps only for the camera to move and zoom out to reveal a staggering number of identical cages, equally stacked. This is one film, like "Schlinder's List", that really hammers home the horrors of what happened during those dark days but crucially, it also deals with the collective conscience of a nation struggling to understand how they could be capable of shocking inhumanity.
"The Reader" may have raised eyebrows with its explicit sex scenes (which aren't that gratuitous, to be fair) but it should have been talked about as one of the best films of last year. It's not easy to watch at times, largely due to the strength of the performances on show. A lot of films will be described as "thought-provoking" but in this case, it is true - my wife and I spoke at length after the film finished about what we had seen, even discussing why the characters made the choices they did. I have never known any film to do that with this viewer or my wife but it perfectly demonstrates why "The Reader" is an essential film and one of the best war-based love stories I've ever seen. First class film-making.