After A Slow Start It Picked Up Steam

Rating: 7/10 (7 August 2009)

I found the first hour or so of this movie to be somewhat tough slogging. The film is set in Germany in 5 different time periods - 1958, 1966, 1976, 1988 and 1995, and moves fairly fluidly between them. Each period offers a depiction of the somewhat complicated relationship between Michael and Hannah. The first hour deals primarily with the 1956 time period. Michael is a 15 year old who becomes ill and is helped by 36 year old Hannah. The two develop a bond, and begin an affair which is rather explicitly depicted. Michael, played in this time period by David Kross, is a fairly typical teenager smitten and somewhat obsessed with an older woman. Hannah, played throughout the movie by Kate Winslet, was a mysterious character, at the same time both cold and distant, and yet very passionate and caring, and one who loved to have Michael read to her. The affair ends abruptly when Hannah disappears. Fast forward to 1966, when Michael is a law student and his class attends a trial of SS guards, where he discovers to his horror that Hannah was one of them. It's at this point that I found the movie really picked up steam. The earlier relationship between Hannah and Michael was interesting but in all honesty not that powerful. Having seen them make love once, I didn't really need to see it 5 or 6 times. With the trial, though, a number of interesting angles began to be explored.
The first came from the 1966 trial itself, and Hannah's rationalization of her actions in letting several hundred Jewish prisoners die in a fire when she could have released them. "We couldn't let them escape," she says. "There would have been chaos." When the judge continues to question her she asks with what appeared to be complete bewilderment "What would you have done?" - a question for which the judge offered no answer. In the end Hannah is sentenced to 20 years in prison. In a way this is another film that depicts the inability to answer many questions about Nazi Germany. In that sense, Hannah is a troubling character. She accepts responsibility for what happened but expresses little guilt for it. "Why did you join the SS?" she's asked. "I needed a job." You get the sense that Hannah doesn't really "get" the horrors of the Third Reich of which she was a part - albeit a minor one.
The second interesting angle was the resumption in the relationship between Michael and Hannah. Having been appalled by the fact that she was an SS guard, Michael struggles with his conscience, because he also realizes that the piece of evidence that got her the harsh sentence wasn't valid. Hannah admitted having written the report about the incident while the other guards on trial denied it, but Michael realized she couldn't have written it - she was illiterate, which was why she enjoyed being read to. It's an unanswered question why she admitted to something she didn't do. Perhaps it was to assuage an unacknowledged guilt, but it was never explained. Ten years later, Michael begins sending her tape recordings of books she liked which he's recited into a recorder. She uses them as a springboard to teach herself to read. Eventually, in 1988, when Hannah is due to be released, the prison contacts him because he's her only connection to the outside world. Their reunion in the prison is somewhat awkward, but he makes arrangements to set her up on the outside, but tragedy prevents that from happening.
The relationship between the two is the focal point of the movie and it's explored in pretty good depth, with good performances by those portraying both characters (Ralph Fiennes plays the older Michael.) I wasn't entirely convinced of the need for the 1995 scenes which depict the relationship between Michael and his adult daughter. For some reason that I didn't understand, this served as a springboard to Michael's reminiscences of Hannah, but the connection wasn't clear. I also wasn't clear why Michael felt the need to take his daughter to Hannah's grave and begin to explain to her the story of their relationship. At first I wondered if, by chance, the real secret would turn out to be that the daughter was actually Hannah's daughter, but once actress Hannah Herzsprung was introduced in the role it became obvious that she was too young. As a result, I found Herzsprung's role superfluous, its significance being left largely unexplained.
In the end, I found this an interesting movie that raises a number of questions and issues, although not offering any real resolution to them. 7/10