Extraordinary script, wonderful directed by Daldry and acted by Winsleet, Feinnes and Kross!

Rating: 10/10 (25 January 2009)

This jewel of a movie delivers a rich and subtle moral message about the legacy of the Holocaust. It is a story about two people from different generations in Germany whose lives intertwine over the last 4 decades in the 20th century. Their relationship begins with an unseemly but wholly believable love affair between Michael, an intelligent, winsome, privileged 15 year-old, and Hannah, a 33 year-old trolley car attendant who's interior life is never made available us. We know her only in what we can glean from the outside. Tho she is worn and hardened, Winslet's physical beauty combines with the opacity of Hannah motives and Michael's youthful innocence to excite powerful sensual, erotic and complex tensions. We know Hannah from the beginning as a poor, lonely and emotionally remote older woman. Though illiterate, she loves good literature and shows unpolished intellectual complexity. From her first interaction with Michael, we know she is capable of acting out of human compassion. All this reminds us that her life might have been very different, if only . . . In contrast, Michael has more gifts, but despite his seemingly good family, his intelligence and winning nature, his whole life (like that of his generation) is haunted by this relationship and its effects not just his life but through him, his daughter's life as well.
The affair lasts only a summer and though it dominates the 1st half of the movie. Over the next 40 years, they directly interact only twice in brief encounters, but Michael's whole life is shaped by this affair and metaphorically parallels the lives of Germans born after the horror of Nazism but indelibly stained by that history and their familial connections to those who lived through it. For we next learn that in the 1960's Hannah is charged along with other former SS guards of committing Nazi war crimes. While the story is told without heavy-handed moralism and only glancing reminders of the horrific historical events, viewers will be disappointed if they expect the rest of the movie to offer some resolution in the lives of these characters or if they think even a qualifiedly sympathetic view of Germans is morally intolerable in any work that touches on the Holocaust. For the full power of this movie is only apparent if the audience puts itself in the shoes of the main characters, and in the process sees them not only symbols of the German generations but expressions of our own frail humanity. Hannah's and Michael's lives are inextricably intertwined as are the lives of pre & post-war German generations. Tho they are Germans, they are, like all humans, trapped in the circumstances of our lives, the conditions that make us beneficiaries or prisoners thru complicity in the accidents and historical circumstances within which we are born and shaped, circumstances outside our control. Yet if we have any decency, we recognize and take moral responsibility for all our choices, whatever circumstances our choices place us in. If before her trial we wondered what Hannah might have been, we must also wonder her motives in leaving Michael, in fleeing from job promotions, in her love of literature and especially in her actions and choices at the trial. The power of this movie comes in making this imaginative identification with both Hannah & Michael, then reflecting on all the questions implied by the choices they make in their lives. that are left for us to puzzle about in each and every scene of this movie.