Sympathy for the She-Devil!

Rating: 3/10 (27 March 2010)

As one poster put it, The Reader is pretentious cheese. Stupid, pretentious cheese! Only in the movies does a girl who finds a boy drenched to the skin and puking his guts out not ask him for his number so that she can phone his parents. Instead, she washes the vomit off the cobblestones (first things first!), gives him a hug (huh?), then walks him home as it begins to snow! After 5 minutes in bed with scarlet fever, the boy tracks down his angel of mercy, spies on her, shovels coal for her, gets naked for her, then lets her have at his scrawny, underage bones. Only in the movies.
The scrawny, underage bone-jumping continues throughout the summer without anyone wondering where the boy goes or what he does or whom he does it with. Turns out Scrawny Underage Bone-Jumper is (surprise!) not exactly the kind of girl you'd bring home to Mother. But since she's played by Kate Winslet, whom, like Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, and (in her salad days) Helen Mirren, drops her drawers the way you and I breathe, what scrawny, underage Boy Toy (who gets his own naughty bits moment when Winslet scrubs him down) is going to have a problem with that?
So what's my problem with this stupid, pretentious cheese, aside from Winslet's God-awful geezer make-up? For starters, the German characters have British accents! Hey, you guys are getting paid good money to be in this stupid, pretentious cheese. Would it kill you to do a German accent?
Fiennes's performance consists of "I'm constipated!" and "I'm really, really constipated!", while Winslet's is one great, big "Look at me! I'm acting!" She-Devil, who is tried for allowing a church full of women and children to burn to the ground, bawls like a baby as she watches a children's choir perform? Spare us! And when she is told that she's getting a promotion, Winslet looks as though she wants to throttle somebody (maybe her agent)!
Fiennes, whose lone resemblance to Boy Toy is that they're both zonked, gives a woman, whom, as a child, was one of She-Devil's "charges", She-Devil's life savings. I didn't know which was more patently-absurd: giving a woman who lives in a 7-figure Manhattan flat a tiny wad of bills or her telling Boy Toy to donate the "blood money" to a Gentile literacy group (Jews, she snootily informs him, hardly have a problem with illiteracy!), but she'll keep the tin that it came in. Wait -- isn't the tin tainted because it contained the "blood money", and, worse, it seriously-clashes with the decor?