Winslet winsome but not too convincing as illiterate German woman

Rating: 5/10 (23 January 2017)

Kate Winslet was the flavor of the week at the 2009 film festival when she arrived to promote her new film "The Reader", directed by Stephen Daldry and costarring Ralph Fiennes. At the packed house press conference on festival day number two, two of Lady Kate's co-stars in the film, veteran British actor Ralph Fiennes, and 17 year old German actor David Kross (her lover in the picture) as well as director Stephen Daldry and the two writers, David hare, screenplay, and Bernhard Schlink, of the original German book on which the film is based, were all present. Daldry, it might be mentioned, is no stranger to Berlin having introduced his big one "The Hours" here in 2002. For those with short memories that was the one in which Nicole Kidman played Virginia Woolf in bulbous nose makeup, and probably more for the bulbous nose than anything else, nabbed an Oscar that year as best actress.
Kate Winslet has been mentioned for Oscars in two of her performances this year, "The Reader" as well as "Revolutionary Road" (opposite Leonardo Dicaprio) and, if not a sure thing against competition like Meryl Streep, is certainly a sentimental favorite as she is getting to be a wee bit overdue. At any rate the gorgeous 33 year old British actress is at this moment probably at the very peak of her physical beauty and can arguably lay claim to the title of reigning queen of Hollywood on both sides of the Atlantic, lesser busy bodies like Nicole Kidman notwithstanding.
For the record, in the film, set back in the postwar Germany of the early fifties, Kate plays a lonely middle aged German woman, Hanna Schmitz, who was once a concentration camp overseer and, because she is illiterate has the teenage boy she has taken in as a lover read to her from storybooks. Pretty interesting stretch of the envelope, one might say, a classic English rose playing a somber Nazi lady thrashing about with a teenage boy to forget her sorrows, and illiterate into the bargain. Kate said she had to do a lot of historical research to prepare herself for this highly uncharacteristic role, which is maybe a light year away from the all-American suburban housewife she plays in "Revolutionary Road". Such looks (quietly breathtaking) and such versatility is definitely something to write home about. This picture which basically addresses the thorny question of lingering German guilt for the atrocities committed by Germans in WWII seems to have sincere intentions but gets to be a bit shaggy with a two hour plus running time of 124 minutes. Germans talking English in this English-speaking German story may turn out to be a hard sell to German audiences, but just watching Kate do her thing may turn out to be enough to make local viewers forget which language she's doing it in. For this viewer it didn't work at all and threw the whole picture out of kilter.
German author Bernhardt Schlink of the best seller on which the film is based was queried about his feelings with respect to seeing his original German dialogue converted into English in the film version, and, in general, as to what he thought of the oddity of German characters speaking English on screen. His reply, that he has no complaints because film is in itself an international language and English has become the lingua franca of international cinema, so his story will now reach a wider audience, elicited an appreciative round of applause at this display of discrete modesty. My own feeling is that it will have a hard time getting past first base on the international market and will do nothing to enhance Winslett's already impressive C.V. But she sure is looking great these days! Alex, Berlin, February 6, 2009.