The day the lawyer cried

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2009)

Those Jews, first they kill Jesus Christ, then they kill an illiterate German woman's self-esteem with their ability to read. In Jerry Lewis' "The Day the Clown Cried", a circus clown is employed by the Nazis to leave the Jewish children laughing all the way to the gas chamber. Since Lewis allegedly owns the last print of this lost film, people can only read about it. But readers don't need to actually see the film before making up their minds about the tastelessness of Lewis' enterprise. The reader knows what went down in the death camps. He uses his imagination. That's why Michael's visit to a concentration camp in "The Reader" strikes me as a moment that creates dissonance within the narrative. As a young law student, Michael Berg(David Kross) had the bloom knocked off his first love in the most dramatic way possible; he learns that his older lover was a Nazi guard in the women's camp who made the female prisoners read to her before they were gassed. In the same court hearing, Hanna(Kate Winslet) and the other guards are being charged with the willful murders of three-hundred Jews, when none of the women opened the doors during a camp fire. As a reader, like the readers in the audience, Michael forms the concentration camp, and the fire in his head. A reader converts words into pictures. In "The Reader", Hanna is never placed in the context of her Nazi party heyday; her crimes are merely rendered through oral history, a court record. Because we never see the hapless woman in uniform, the film seems to neither exonerate, nor vilify, her Nazi past.
In the film's most extraneous scene, as aforementioned, Michael tours a concentration camp, which has the unintended effect of siding with Hanna, by its implication that the audience is just like her; they're non-readers who need everything spelled out for them. Since Michael(Ralph Fiennes) shows kindness towards a war criminal, the filmmaker is obliged to acknowledge the six million Jews who perished during WWII as a counterbalance against favoritism, by showing Michael's guided tour through hell. This is overcompensation, however. Overcompensation for what exactly? The filmmaker conducts an act of unconscious illiteracy, in the filmic sense, when he misjudges his protagonist, who as a reader, already understands the evil inherent in the words spoken by the court magistrate, concerning Hanna's role as a guard. This scene is for the audience, exposition for exposition's sake. When Kate remains silent about her inability to read or write, choosing to claim authorship of a report about the fire she didn't write; likewise, the filmmaker's intended audience is illiterate by not reading the concentration camp scene as a means of permission to find Hanna a sympathetic character, despite her affiliation with the Nazi party. Nobody wants to admit that Hanna is actually more likable than Rose Mather(Lena Olin), a holocaust survivor who wrote a memoir about her concentration camp experience. Rose seems so far-removed from her survivor past, she comes across as one of those profiteers that Tova Reich wrote about in her novel "My Holocaust". The audience feels obliged to embrace Rose's thorniness as Michael tries to make amends with the holocaust survivor on Hanna's behalf, but the film is not calibrated in favor of the Jewish victims. Hanna is the victim. The non-reader relates with the Nazi, their partner-in-crime, against the Jew, the person who can read and write.
The day the lawyer cried in "The Reader" was not because three-hundred Jews died in a fire. Michael cries when his Nazi lover writes back to him. It's hard to recommend a film which manipulates a segment of the audience into identifying with the vulnerable side of evil incarnate, and ignoring evil's nature altogether.