Strangely flat and lifeless

Rating: 7/10 (29 January 2009)

Stephen Daldry's The Reader is based on a novel by Bernhard Schlink that grew out of an experience from the author's youth when he discovered that the teacher he had admired for his love of literature had a darker past. Shown through the lens of memory by an adult lawyer (Ralph Fiennes), the film is set in Berlin, thirteen years after the end of World War II. A fifteen-year old boy, stricken with a sudden illness in an apartment doorway on his way home from school is assisted by an older woman. Six months after his recuperation from Scarlet Fever, the boy returns with flowers. After the woman provides a bath for him to clean up from shoveling coal, he is initiated into sex. The woman is Hanna (Kate Winslet) who collects fares on the local streetcar and the boy is Michael Berg (David Kross), who returns every afternoon. Hanna also has a strange obsession.
She wants to be read to and Michael eagerly complies, reading The Odyssey, The Lady With the Little Dog by Chekhov, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and even Lady Chatterley's Lover which she objects to. Then, one day she disappears without explanation and the film flashes forward eight years. Michael is in law school and his class led by their teacher Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz) is observing the trial of Nazi war criminals. Shockingly, Michael observes that Hanna is one of six co-defendants, all former guards at concentration camps who, by their inaction, allowed three hundred Jews to be burned to death in a bombed church. He has to face the trauma of not only seeing his first love after many years but also finding out that she was perhaps the woman most responsible for the deaths of the prisoners the guards were assigned to watch.
Sadly, Michael fails to reconnect with Hanna during the trial and views the proceedings from a distance. Though knows a secret that may help Hanna in her defense, he is unwilling to go the extra step to visit her in prison and try to convince her to help herself. The older Michael, now a lawyer, however, attempts to rekindle the emotions of his youth by sending her tapes in prison of him reading classic books. Adapted for the screen by David Hare, The Reader has an important story to tell, allowing us to gauge the reaction of the younger generation in postwar Germany to revelations of Nazi complicity among their elders. Unfortunately, however, I found it to be strangely flat and lifeless, undercut by an air of portentous self-importance and peopled with characters whose complexities and contradictions are never fully illuminated.