Two lives played out in 20th century Berlin

Rating: 8/10 (12 December 2015)

The Reader is a well acted and nicely filmed movie with scenes that take lawyer Michael Berg back from late 20th century Germany to his teenage years and then as a student in post-war Germany. As a 15 year-old youth, played by David Kross, he develops a relationship with an older, illiterate woman when she finds him very ill one rainy day in an alleyway in Berlin. Aside from a passionate relationship, graphically shown on screen, he also reads to her from some of the great classical novels. This is an unknown territory for the illiterate Hanna, whose world is now open to great writers.
Ralph Fiennes is the mature Michael, who is a successful lawyer with a daughter from an earlier marriage. Facing some personal questions about his relationship with his daughter, he revisits his youth in his own memory, coming in contact with Hannah Schmitz, played by Kate Winslett. Hannah ekes out a living collecting fares from streetcar passengers.
We later find out that Hanna took a job with a German company Siemens working in a death camp during World War II. There, she routinely selects prisoners for death in the gas chambers. In her trial, which Michael witnessed as a law student, it is clear that she carried out her duties without guilt. To some, this appears as evidence of her complicity in war crimes. To Michael, it must have seemed that she did not fully realize what she was doing. Neither did she know until later the impact of her relationship with Michael, who apparently was haunted by his youthful sexual liaison with Hannah. In the end, Hannah does come to terms with her past and Michael becomes her only contact with the world as he carries out her final wishes.
Kate Winslett plays a lonely woman who is drawn to Michael, a talented language student. As an older, broken woman, she shows the effects of her tortured life journey. Her story makes the viewer feel a strange sympathy, while feeling repelled by her choices in life. Michael, as a youth, is made exceptionally realistic with David Cross in the role. Ralph Fiennes shows the disappointment of a middle aged man as he looks back on his life; yet he is capable of changing course.
The acting of Ralph Fiennes and David Kross as Michael and Kate Winslett as Hannah Schmitz gives the movie its punch. Two people whose lives cross give shape to a complex and profound story.