Ms. Winslet's Film

Rating: 8/10 (18 February 2009)

The Reader belongs to Kate Winslet: she is quite simply superb. Everybody else, Ralph Fiennes included, slip into oblivion. The sex scenes are- how does one put it?- both erotic and disturbing. When the Kid (played by David Kross) asks her if she- a much older woman- loves him, she nods. But the nod is everything. It means no and yes and also 'are you kidding me?', all at once.
Her past is demonic, no doubt, but I suspect that the viewer will (like me) come out of the movie sympathizing with her. After seeing the film, the question that perplexed me was why did she kill herself? The most obvious answer is Guilt. Yet, I can't help feeling that it might be something else also. Why for instance didn't this Guilt consume her before? And whether this Guilt also included her abandoning- not loving- the Kid, which, as we discover, leaves him permanently petrified- passive and polite? But she couldn't have known all that, could she? Perhaps- and this is the only answer I could come up with- she was ashamed of not being able to read, so ashamed in fact that she chose to spend the rest of her life in prison than let people know this. Like Salman Rushdie wrote in 'Shame', if you tell the secret, it invites shame; if you don't, you are stuck with guilt. Kate's character chooses guilt.
That she couldn't read was the only secret she wished to keep as her own, having no qualms about admitting to her other more horrific misdeeds: it was indeed the defining characteristic of who she was, the one thing that made her, and what eventually becomes our key to understanding her. Ironically enough, once that secret is gone- she does eventually teach herself to read and write with the help of audio-tapes of books Ralph Fiennes' character sends her- she no longer knows her place in the world...
But we can never know the answer for certain, and that is what makes The Reader such a great, beautifully multi-layered- and might I add, secretive?- film.