Powerful Holocaust drama

Rating: 9/10 (23 May 2009)

Like all works of art that endeavor to "illuminate" the Holocaust, "The Reader" ultimately finds itself looking for answers where none can be found. Yet, the beauty of the film is that it seems to acknowledge the impossibility of its task. Thus, rather than trying to resolve all the issues it raises, the movie simply lays them out before us, trusting that, in the final analysis, we will be able to come to our own conclusions about what, if anything, it all "means."
Though it is set in a number of different time periods, the story proper begins in 1958, when a 15-year-old German boy by the name of Michael Berg is seduced by a 38-year-old woman named Hanna Schmitz. For a summer, the two carry on a secret, illicit affair, wherein the woman introduces the boy to the joys of physical love, while he reciprocates by reading the classics to her between bouts of passionate lovemaking. Flash forward to 1966 when Michael, now a university law student, discovers, much to his horror, that this very same Hanna who meant so much to him in his youth is actually a former concentration camp guard currently standing trial for war crimes. The story goes even further ahead in time as a now middle-aged Michael keeps up the relationship by sending his personalized recordings of books to Hanna as she serves out her time in prison.
There has been some criticism leveled against the film that it aims to cast a Nazi mass murderer in a "sympathetic" light. Yet, what ultimately comes across in the story is not how "likable" a person Hanna is but how sadly tragic. Like all fine drama, "The Reader" goes beyond the two-dimensional stereotypes of heroes and villains to examine the complexity of human relationships and the messiness of the human condition. The movie keeps us emotionally off-balance throughout. Even in the early stages of the courtship, we are torn between our attraction to the characters as individuals and our revulsion at the difference in their ages. Hanna is particularly enigmatic as she embraces a child two decades her junior yet seems to find some strange fulfillment in him that goes beyond the obvious physicality of their relationship. Despite the touchy nature of these scenes, we get a feel for what brings these two very different characters together at this particular moment in time.
As the story moves on, the screenplay confronts many of the thornier issues surrounding what exactly happened in Germany in the middle of the Twentieth Century, questioning how so many "average" people could, at best, have turned a blind eye to the events that were occurring, and, at worst, have allowed themselves to become complicit in the mass atrocities. There's a beautifully incisive scene in which a young law student confronts his professor, demanding to know how the man has been able to live with himself for all these years, knowing that he did not do everything within his power to try and stop what was happening. In that brief, shining moment, we get a sense of what it must have been like for the people in Germany in the decades following the war when so many, Hanna included, simply turned their backs on the past in an effort to move on with their lives.
Perhaps the most complex character in the story is Michael, who, as he ages and learns more and more hidden truths about his first love, must come to terms with the fact that the woman he thought he knew on the most intimate of terms may, in fact, be an unrepentant mass murderer. Yet, love is not something that can be turned on and off at will, and it takes Michael decades to figure out just how best to deal with the moral dilemma raging in the very depths of his soul.
Michael is played first by David Kross in the period from 1958 to 1966, and then by Ralph Fiennes in the time thereafter. Both are superb, with Kross, in particular, delivering a performance of such delicacy and sensitivity that he sets the groundwork for what Fiennes is called on to do later in the film. And, of course, Kate Winslet, in the role that won her an Oscar, demonstrates yet again why she is one of the screen's great actresses.
Kudos must also go to screenwriter David Hare, who has adapted Bernhard Schlink's complexly structured novel with integrity and taste, and to director Stephen Daldry and cinematographers Chris Menges and Roger Deakins for the sumptuous look they have achieved with the film. Together, these fine artists have created a work that challenges the intellect and roils the emotions.