Warning: This Review Contains Full Frontal Nudity

Rating: 1/10 (8 October 2009)

Warning: this review contains full frontal nudity. But that's okay, because you really can't get a grip on the Holocaust until you've had a gynecologist's eye view of Kate Winslet's naked *&^%s.
"The Reader" is pretentious cheese. It isn't honest enough to be straightforward soft-core coming-of-age porn, or to be a hard-hitting, revelatory Holocaust movie. Rather, it's a clunky and silly film that attempts to graft the one onto the other and succeeds at neither. "The Reader" brings the viewer in, and then teases him, with a half hour of almost uninterrupted simulated bodily functions, combined with nude bathing. It's all a great big, high school literature class metaphor about the washing off of guilt, dontcha know. Then "The Reader" devotes its remaining hours to scenes of well-dressed, attractive young Germans sitting around asking and declaring, "Who's guilty? Aren't all our parents guilty? I hate my parents." Overlaying every boring, banal, scene and vapid line of dialogue with ponderous, self-important gas, "The Reader" ultimately succeeds at neither serious discussion nor eroticism.
From top to bottom, the cast is first rate. David Kross is achingly poignant as teenager Michael Berg, who, in the 1950s, loses his virginity in an affair with Hanna Schmitz, a 36-year-old, former SS concentration camp guard. Kross is both intimately human and vulnerable and also larger than life and every bit the compelling, big screen movie star. In that he reminds the viewer of the young Peter O'Toole. May Kross have a long and bountiful career.
In the "deleted scenes" reel on the DVD, there are three fine scenes that could have served as centers of three fine movies. In the most gripping, Thomas Thieme is a truck driver who gives Kross a ride on a backwoods road where a large horse is transporting logs. Thieme is repulsive, terrifying, and also clearly human and in need of understanding. In another deleted scene, in a conversation with his professor (the always brilliant Bruno Ganz) an attractive German boy admits that his father was an SS guard. In a third deleted scene, a prisoner painstakingly learns to read in a prison cell. That these three fabulous scenes were deleted, while endless scenes of nude bathing were kept, informs you of the filmmakers' eye on the box office.
In the DVD commentary, the film's director Stephen Daldry, CBE (Commander of the British Empire), script writer David Hare, and novelist Bernhard Schlink smugly pat themselves on the back. Wearing professorial clothing, tweeds and nubbly sweaters, these graying white men express how mah-velous, perfectly mah-velous it is that they've made such a big, fat, profound film that will finally get people to engage in some serious thought about the Holocaust. Significantly, they never mention a single other of the, by now, millions of works of art that got to the topic before they did, nor do they ever address their pimping out Kate Winslet's &^%*s to make their contribution to the body of Holocaust lit stand out.
Check out the IMDb discussion board for "The Reader." Most threads are devoted to such deep and heavy topics as clinically detailed examinations of the tautness and firmness, pendulousness or sag of Kate Winslet's #*&^'s, the straightness or curvature and length of David Kross' %$#^*, the specific acts that the characters engage in, and what bodily orifices are employed.
This review is not a protest against erotica; it's a protest against BS. This review isn't even a protest against the disturbingly burgeoning subgenre of Holocaust porn. In fact there is a brilliant, scathing, unforgettable scene in "Schindler's List" where Nazi concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) menaces his Jewish slave, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz) as she bathes in a cramped basement. That scene is so powerful and unforgettable because it has two things "The Reader" completely lacks: psychological insight – the viewer knows exactly who Goeth and Hirsch are and what their relationship is to each other, and, thus, complexity and depth, and stylistic sophistication – Goeth does all the talking. He imagines Helen's replies.
Look, there is worthy art out there about the Holocaust. Read Elie Wiesel's "Night," Borowski's "This Way to the Gas;" Rufeisen's "In the Lion's Den," see "Schindler's List," "Europa Europa," "The Gray Zone," "Shoah," or "The Shop on Main Street." There's also really good soft-core porn out there, much of it free on the internet. "The Reader" gains nothing, and says nothing, in its pretentious, but commercially shrewd, attempt to combine the two genres.