A movie of profound moral dilemmas!

Rating: 10/10 (2 April 2009)

Diane and I watched this moving, confronting film yesterday and we both felt its disturbing combination of innocent guilt (can there be such a contradiction of terms?) and commonplace evil. So much is illuminated in the last part of the film; so many questions answered and so many moral issues raised during the film's trial that a person like myself left the theatre with fascinating moral dilemmas jumping over each other and made The Reader an extremely satisfying viewing experience. To me, the most memorable scene took place at the trial when the prosecutor asked Hanna (Kate Winslet) why she did not open the door of the burning church when she knew that a fire was sweeping through the building. Hanna, when questioned by the trial judge and asked why she did such a thing, replied that it was the proper thing to do; that she was an SS guard and that to let the people out of the burning church would have meant chaos and as a guard she could not allow that to happen. Hannah Arendt perfectly described the moral situation that the Hanna of the movie found herself in and she described it as the banality of evil. To quote her, "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil" and isn't this precisely the situation that Hanna Schmitz found herself confronting? After this startling revelation, the viewer must deal with the confronting personal trauma faced by Fienne's character, Michael Berg; should he tell the court of Hanna's illiteracy (a personal problem she has lived with her entire life) or keep her secret and see her spend her adult life behind bars while her fellow SS guards continue their lie and escape justice?
The Reader is an intellectual, severe movie that people should see without fail.