The Kind of Film to Admire Rather Than Fall in Love With

Rating: 7/10 (29 December 2008)

"The Reader" is full of interesting ideas, but it suffers from lacklustre execution.
The central question at the heart of the story is whether or not we'll ever be able to distance ourselves enough from the Holocaust to understand how it was allowed to happen. Categorizing every person who played a role in it as a monster is easy and it provides an emotional catharsis, but it also prevents us from learning from history. After all, not every person who worked in a concentration camp was evil -- many of them were just people doing their jobs without any of the historical context we now have. And if we disregard them as something inhuman, we won't be able to know how to prevent something similar from happening again.
This question plays out in the story of Hannah, a former concentration camp guard (played by Kate Winslet), and Michael, played as a young man by David Kross and as an older man by Ralph Fiennes. Hannah and David have an affair before David knows of Hannah's past, and comes across her again years later when he's a law student and she's on trial as a war criminal. David must reconcile his loathing of what Hannah did with the fact that he knows she's not a monster. Hannah's real shame are not her crimes, but rather the fact that she never learned to read, and the film's best moments come in the third act when Michael, as a way of expiating some of the guilt he feels at not coming to Hannah's defense when he knew information that would have helped her case, records himself reading some of Hannah's favorite stories and sends them to her in prison.
"The Reader" is a solid piece of film-making, but it has that ever-so-slightly-embalmed quality that comes when a director and writer feel the need to be too respectful to the source material. It's sombre and tactful and always feels more like a filmed book than a movie. It never comes cinematically alive. It boasts good performances, especially from Winslet and Lena Olin, who has brief dual roles as mother and daughter concentration camp survivors. And it has one all-too-brief thrilling sequence in which Winslet's character decides to spend her time in prison learning to read -- just watch Winslet's face as Hannah recognizes the word "the" for the first time. Otherwise, it's the kind of movie to admire rather than fall in love with.
Grade: B+