Non-formulaic, but not to be admired much either

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2011)

The Reader is an interesting non-formulaic story, with a complex character (Hanna Schmitz) played by Kate Winslet. Though, as some characters mention in the movie, it seems there's not much to learn from the experience of watching it.
Consider the protagonist: admitting illiteracy is more shameful than admitting participating in mass murder? And why didn't Hanna learn to read on her own after she met Michael, or before that anyway? Another note: Hanna's justification of why she let the 300 prisoners die in a church that caught on fire is not that she was told to (which would be explainable by Philip Zimbardo's experiments on abuse of power under duress from authority figures), or that she'd be prosecuted herself, but that... there would have been chaos if she let the prisoners free. Good role model for schizophrenia perhaps.
What might be learned from this movie is summarized in this quote by the old law professor:
...Societies think they operate by something called morality, but they don't. They operate by something called law.
...8000 people worked at Auschwitz. Precisely 19 have been convicted, and only 6 of murder.
...The question is never "Was it wrong", but "Was it legal". And not by our laws, no. By the laws at the time.