The Reader is performance driven movie

Rating: 6/10 (25 March 2013)

Last week I saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.. Steven Daldry has this quality of telling the story from quite a number of angles.. But the story loses its pace somewhere in between.. The reader is a movie that tells the story of Hanna Schmitz(Kate Winslet) and Michael Berg over a long period.. The movie starts off showing Michael preparing breakfast and it goes backwards where Michael met Hanna for the first time.. Hanna took him home where he was detected with fever.. He came back to Hanna when he recovered where the affair begins and the affair goes on and on and on... In between the affair Hanna expresses her likings to read books but she likes being read to rather that reading herself.. Michael reads her "The Odyssey," "Huck Finn" and "The Lady with the Little Dog." Despite the bond they shared Hanna disappears from Michael's life one day.. The story moves to the point when Michael is seen in law classes. The professor takes Michael to live court sessions where he sees Hanna is being trial-ed for murdering 300 lives during Nazi war crimes.. There Michael discovers the reason of Hanna not reading books herself.. Because she is illiterate.. He sees Hanna admits all the murders in order to keep the secret that she does not know how to write.. Hanna is imprisoned for life and Michael becomes a lawyer with a unsuccessful marriage and a daughter.. While in prison Michael sends Hanna recorded tapes of all the novels that helps Hanna to past time.. She used the tapes to learn reading and writing that helped her to write letters to Michael.. However Michael does not reply to her.. At the time when Hanna was to be released from prison Michael was her only contact.. Then we see the first confront of Michael and Hanna after the date Hanna disappears.. Michael told Hanna that he has got an apartment for her and a job that upsets Hanna because she expected that Michael would keep her with him... She did not see the Michael that she wanted to see which killed all her intentions to live and that made her commit suicide leaving a will for Michael.. She instructed Michael to give her money to the girl that survived the Nazi fire.. Michael does as she says.. The last scene shows Michael taking her daughter to the grave of Hanna and telling her the story of theirs...
A movie showing Nazi war crimes, illiteracy, a secret and intense love making needs a better treatment.. the relationship between Michael and Hanna never increased emotionally.. The story jumped from subject to subject.. the only thing that held the movie together was the performance of Kate Winslet and young Michael(David Kross).. Kate was good throughout the movie.. You will see the movie and think about it for 5 minutes.. it will not reach your heart.. Altogether a movie that could have been more emotional and more intense.. This is where I miss Clint Eastwood...