Reading The Reader

Rating: 9/10 (13 July 2009)

Director Stephen Daldry, Producers Anthony Minghella and Sidney Pollack, Screenwriter David Hare, have combined to produce a brilliantly realised story of multiple layers of emotion, history, conflict, and personal tragedies. Bernhard Schlink's seriously complex novel weaves a horrific Holocaust incident into a backdrop for an unlikely but telling love story between a young innocent and an experienced, if naive and uneducated, woman, which allegorises the younger German generation finding out, and trying to come to terms with, their awful past. The novel is a great piece of restrained and convincing storytelling, and the film succeeds in re-working the novel into an equivalently convincing drama. However, the film would be nothing without the superb performances of Kate Winslet and David Kross. I am amazed at Kross's performance. Kate Winslet has had years to perfect her acting and I have never seen her perform better, but Kross, only 18 when the film was made, matches her scene for scene, and brings juvenile acting to a new level.
The only disappointment was Ralph Fiennes. He has a tendency to drag out scenes of emotional intensity to a degree that borders on melodrama. This story is pure drama, not melodrama. Unfortunately, Fiennes's role, mainly constrained to the last scenes of the film, causes the film's momentum to drop, which is a great pity. The pathos and heartbreak of the denouement of Kate Winslet's character, Hanna, is thereby undermined.
The novel is a masterpiece of intensity portrayed through spare and deliberate restraint in writing. The film manages to capture that spirit of intensity and maintain it throughout, until the last scenes where Fiennes, so self-absorbed, cannot make himself go through the mirror of his character and objectify it to make it real.
Winslet certainly deserved her Oscar for not only a fine piece of acting, but for constraining her theatrical personality and changing her acting style so dramatically, to convey the loneliness and agony of the internal Hanna, at loggerheads with the inhuman world she found herself in as a young woman which confounded her in every way. She was broken yet continued to live. She found her lost innocence again in her teenage lover, but he had to grow up.
This story is a tragedy, an allegory, an historical analysis in fictional form, an indictment of inhumanity, and yet remains, all through, an impressive and unusual love story. The film (and the book) have not, in my opinion, received enough attention. This is presumably because the story is also about uncomfortable issues and history. It deserves much more recognition than a Best Actress Oscar. It will last, though, and be watched and re-watched in future years, and time will give it its due reward to one of the best films I have seen for years - in fact since Daldry's The Hours.