Monster or Victim?

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2009)

The Reader tries to tackle questions as broad as What is truth? What is justice? And, more narrowly, who should be singled out to pay for a nation's collective guilt? But the key question confronting law student Michael Berg (David Kross) is respect for Hanna Schmitz' (Kate Winslet) privacy versus the truth needed for justice.
The film, directed by Stephen Daldry and based on a work of fiction Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink, touched on stereotypical elements of the German psyche such as an excessive need for order and approval by superiors and helped to explain why good Germans became Hitler's willing executioners. Reader is a very good movie thanks in part to the acting of Winslet and Kross (younger Michael). This is nothing against the acting of Ralph Fiennes (older Michael), but the defining scenes of the movie involved the younger rather than the older Michael. At times the film moved slowly as Daldry kept the camera on Winslet or Fiennes as if to give us time to try to decipher what secrets were in their minds. Would the film have been better in German with sub-titles? Perhaps, but I think Winslet and Fiennes made convincing enough Germans.
One scene is reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, but under the freer standards of 2008 versus 1968 the film goes on to show the culmination of their encounter. Is this a good thing or not? Perhaps The Graduate's bedroom scene suggested the contrast between jaded experience and unsure enthusiasm better than The Reader showed it in living color. The Reader also presents a reflection of a theme from Sophie's Choice (a great book, but a not-so-great movie) from the point of view of the prison guard rather than the prisoner.
Another sub-plot deals with the reason six low-level female camp guards were tried for war crimes 21 years after the war's end. A survivor of the camps had published a book singling out these six. Such a book could have been a source of renewed anti-Semitism as Germans asked why the survivor is reopening old wounds by going after women who were only following orders. But Daldry brings this sub-plot to a meaningful close. In a difficult encounter that takes place in New York in 1995, Fiennes and the survivor (Rose Mather, played by Lena Olin) try to come to grips with forgiveness, absolution and responsibility.
At the end of the movie, we are left with two questions: Was Hanna Schmitz an unfeeling monster who felt no remorse for her part in the murder of 300 human beings, and who used (and statutorily raped) 15-year old Michael Berg for her own pleasure? Or did Kate Winslet convince us that Hanna was a victim: a naïve young woman who believed she was only doing her duty for the Fatherland and engaging in a harmless, mutually pleasurable relationship with Michael Berg? And what about Michael Berg? Was he always destined to be an amoral attorney who never acknowledged the guilt of his parent's generation, including the guilt of Hanna? Or was he the victimnever able to enter into full relationships with others because of his youthful affair with Hanna?