A nice tale which let's the viewer come to his own conclusions

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2009)

The story is a simple one, with a twist. A boy has an affair with an older woman, who one day abandons him without a word. A quiet, sensitive boy, in post WW2 Germany. Finding him retching outside her house she takes him in and cleans him up. When he recuperates and comes to thank her, the relationship becomes kinetic.
He is educated, she is not. He is innocent, she is not. They make a trade. If he'll read his books of literature to her, she'll please him sexually. He learns little of her, and she doesn't offer much to him, except her body. When he pleads for more, she berates him with: "you mean nothing to me." It is a prophetic remark that shows us more of her, but little else is forthcoming, and when he hesitantly asks her if she means it, she seems to grudgingly back down. As it turns out this exchange may be crucial for the boy's, and our understanding of her character.
A few years later, when attending a war crimes trial for a class, he is stunned to see his former lover as one of those accused. She was a guard at Auschwitz. The young man is devastated, but holds his silence to his friends. He decides to visit her in jail but backs out. Then he realizes that he has evidence that can change the course of her trial, but continues to keep silent.
It is his silence that makes up the core of this movie, and it is it's unraveling that is left to the audience. Is his reason simple or complex? Is he acting out of cowardice, malice, or a sense of justice? As a man (Ralph Fiennes) he one day decides to send her one of the books he used to read to her. But not the book, rather a tape he has made of himself reading the book. He had realized in the trial that the one thing he knew about her, was the one thing that might have given her a more lenient sentence: she is illiterate. How this could have been a mitigating factor I won't divulge.
Using his tapes and looking at the books she teaches herself to read, and starts to write to him, but he never responds, continuing his silence, and yet continuing to correspond to her as a "Reader." What are we to make of him? Or her? My take on it, is that she was a simple, concrete soul, used to taking orders, and able to separate herself emotionally from her job, yet remaining shallow in spite of all the fine literature she is exposed to. She ends up being able to read, but never able to fathom. She comes across not as callous, but as vapid.
He on the other hand comes across as a weak man, unable to grapple with the paradox of loving a "monster," who he never knew as a monster. Unable to offer much except that which he can do at a distance. He is not callous, but is, like his erstwhile lover, emotionally hollow.
Winslett is haunting, and emanates pathos. The boy David Kross is winning as a winsome lad. All in all the movie held up well and was engrossing, but I could have done without the final scene with Lena Olin, who plays a victim of the holocaust, imperiously, and unsympathetically, and the scene seems to have had only one purpose: to allow her to get in the pregnant line: "you can learn nothing from the camps."