Only the "important" half of the book portrayed appropriately

Rating: 6/10 (20 March 2009)

It is sad to see another book-to-movie conversion gone wrong. Overall this film is certainly okay, but if you've read the book, especially in the original, you will probably be disappointed.
Obviously a lot of the director's and cast's attention was caught up with the usual Nazi, World War II and Holocaust themes. Which unfortunately caused them to completely under-portray the more subtle human angle that was the relationship between Hanna and Michael. Especially Kate Winslet's portrayal of a Berlin woman of the time was very, very poor. It is admittedly very hard to accurately portray a typical Berlin character, even more so if one has never lived in the region and even more so without speaking the typical Berlin dialect of German. Unfortunately all these things are necessary to accurately bring alive the character of Hanna Schmitz and the relationship between her and Michael. It is quite apparent that Kate Winslet could never fully get into the character of Hanna Schmitz, which leaves the whole movie with a rather stale aftertaste.
The book has a variety of central themes: simple juvenile first love, responsibility in an unbalanced relationship, pride and how to deal with the problems it brings, broad human rights questions and philosophical points both small and big. While the movie attempts to bring out all these nuances, it only succeeds in a few areas, and virtually all of these have already been covered by a great many movies dealing with WWII themes. Why Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her sub-par performance is quite beyond me.
Having said that, the rest of the cast are pretty good most of the time, the settings are very accurate and the questions the movie does manage to stir up are important and well done. Overall it remains just slightly above average though.