Learning from history

Rating: 6/10 (5 December 2016)

In the anti Apartheid film, A Dry White Season the lawyer character played by Marlon Brando stated that Law and Justice are not the same thing, at best they are distant cousins and in South Africa they are not even on talking terms.
In a similar vein in The Reader, Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz) the law professor argues: 'Societies think they operate by something called morality, but they don't. They operate by something called law.'
He goes on to say: '8000 people worked at Auschwitz. Precisely 19 have been convicted, and only 6 of murder.'
The Reader is an infuriating film although I admire its subtlety and in some ways daring. Although the narrative is jumbled up, it consists of a love affair of Michael Berg (David Kross)a 15 year old schoolboy and a tram conductress Hanna (Kate Winslet) who is over twice his age. It is a passionate affair mainly due to his raging teenage hormones and during their time together he reads books to her.
Hanna then suddenly disappears and the story moves eight years later when Michael is a law student attending trials of Nazis with other students and their lecturer Professor Rohl. To his horror he finds Hanna is one of the defendants as she was a guard at Auschwitz and is accused of allowing several hundred prisoners to burn to death locked inside a church.
This incidents sullies his memories of Hanna and racks him with guilt. Unable to talk to anyone about this he finds that he has information that could help her and lower her sentence. Micheal realises that the reason Hanna liked him to read to her was because she was illiterate and the accusations she is facing was the she allegedly gave written orders leading to people's death. This cannot be true but Hanna is embarrassed to let people know she cannot read or write.
The final section consists of an older Michael (Ralph Fiennes) who we see in some scenes now a wealthy, successful lawyer, divorced but with a child still affected by her relationship with Hanna. Over time he has sent her tapes in which he narrates stories to her and eventually just before she is about to be released from prison he goes to see Hanna who is now an old woman.
Eventually Michael goes to New York to see one of the survivors from Auschwitz who a small child at the time. It is an uncomfortable experience for him as he confesses his love affair with Hanna to her. The first time he has ever spoke about it.
I somehow felt that the film always did not get its theme across clearly despite its symbolism and imagery. I liked parts of the film but it did not lead to a coherent whole.
Hanna asks the Judge at the trial what would you have done?' Of course no answer is forthcoming. In the same vein young Micheal allows Hanna to be wrongly convicted. He is angry, ashamed, bitter or just clueless. Yet someone gave those written orders and he let Hanna carry the blame and let the real culprit get away with a lesser charge.
I did think Hanna's lawyer was useless, I have little idea of the German legal system but he let her basically walk into jail and throw the key away. Surely he would had known that Hanna was not exactly that bright and she could not read or write. Did she never sign anything? Maybe one of Michael's fellow students was right, the trial was a sham, deflecting guilt from the many to a few.