More atonement than drama

Rating: 5/10 (19 February 2009)

'The Reader' begins in West Germany in 1958. Michael Berg hails from a grim-faced German family and is ready to sow his adolescent oats. Hanna Schmitz, former SS concentration guard now turned streetcar conductor, brings Michael back to her apartment after he's not feeling well. Hanna gives Michael a bath and before you know it she's playing sex therapist to the impressionable teenager. The affair lasts a scant month or so but on screen it feels like an interminable couple of years.
While Hanna is tender showing Michael new sexual positions, she is unable to control those flashes of temper (foreshadowing the revelation of a very nasty past!). Michael ends up reading various classic novels he's been reading at school to Hanna and she hides a deep dark secret that she is actually illiterate! One day Michael comes over to Hanna's apartment and she's disappeared.
Flash forward to 1966. Michael is now a law student in Heidelberg. As part of a class trip, he attends a war crimes trial and finds Hanna in the docket, accused of unimaginable horrors as a Nazi concentration camp guard. Initially, Hanna denies she's the ringleader of a group of female guards responsible for an atrocity where they prevent a group of Jewish prisoners, locked inside a burning church, from escaping. Prosecutors insist that a document ordering the atrocity is in Hanna's handwriting. Hanna won't give up her dark secret of being illiterate and falsely confesses, taking the rap for her fellow Nazis. It costs her big time: a sentence of life in prison.
The first half of 'The Reader' is slow-moving, the erotic scenes are repetitious and there's no central antagonist unless you count what's going on in Michael's confused mind. In a slightly more interesting second half, we meet an all grown up Michael (played by a grim-faced Ralph Fiennes). He's alienated and cut off from his emotions evidenced by his inability to bond with his daughter. Obviously he is still troubled by his relationship with Hanna even after all these years.
So Michael decides to record the famous novels he used to read to Hanna in the old days on cassette tapes. Soon, Hanna is devouring the tapes and over the years finally learns to read comparing the tape narrations to books she's taken out in the prison library. Hanna writes to Michael but he won't write back (even though he still has feelings for her the idea of writing to a convicted former SS guard is something a good German should not do).
Finally Hanna is about to be released but she has no family to help on the outside. Will Michael come and help her get set up with her own apartment? After initially balking, Michael changes his mind and meets Hanna in the prison cafeteria where he informs her that he's taken care of the apartment. But Michael asks her in effect does she feel any remorse for her actions as a Nazi? All she can that she is happy she's learned to read. As for the atrocitiesthere's nothing she can do about it now. Michael isn't happy with the answer but he'll still help her. But Hanna must pay the price in terms of the audience. No remorse = the need for some kind of punishment (Nazis must be punished!) So what does she do? On the day of her release, Hanna hangs herself. But she leaves a makeshift will, donating the rest of her cash to one of the Holocaust survivors, a woman who testified against her at the trial.
In the best scene in the movie (and most truthful) Michael visits the Holocaust survivor in the United States where he informs her of Hanna's wishes. She doesn't want Hanna's money and tells Michael if he wants drama he should go to the theater and not dwell on concentration camps where no positive life lessons can be learned. Still Michael suggests donating the money to an illiteracy campaign and the Holocaust survivor won't stand in his way.
Flash forward to 1995. Michael has overcome his demons and he's ready to tell the whole story of Hanna to his daughter as they pass Hanna's headstone in a church cemetery.
Although the Reader is not a very dramatic or even good movie, it still is fascinating because its main focus is on the whole issue of German guilt. The movie is based on a novel written by a German writer, Bernhard Schlink, who is grappling with years of guilt feelings over the Holocaust. He's saying in effect, 'Hey, we Germans aren't that bad. Can you forgive us?' Schlink (and the Reader's screenwriter, David Hare) present two characters that don't mince words (the aforementioned daughter of the Holocaust survivor at the end of the movie and a young law student who points out that Hanna and her co-defendants are scapegoats since there were thousands who went unpunished).
But while Schlink can face German responsibility for the Holocaust, he can do so only up to a point. His guilt leads to such confusion that Hanna is presented as a tragic figure, done in by ignorance. During the trial, it was her compulsive need for order that prevents her from allowing the prisoners to escape (however more typically, Nazis on trial would say they were "only following orders").
'The Reader' gives the wrong impression that Hanna was somehow not responsible for her actionsthat somehow by being ignorant, deep down she wasn't a bad person. In this way Schlink and Hare sugarcoat their antagonist. The vast majority of Nazis were not illiterate, ignorant peoplethey knew exactly what they were doing and they, along with the German people, followed Hitler with gusto.
The generation of post-war Germans don't have to apologize for 'the sins of their fathers' nor feel guilt. They merely have to study history with clear and detached eyes in order to make sure things like this never happen again.