Just what are we being told here?

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2009)

The Holocaust is such a huge subject in every sense that it's not surprising that there have been so many films examining the experience from so many varied angles. By one authoritative reckoning, there have been nearly 300 such cinematic works and some - such "Sophie's Choice" and "Schindler's List" - have been truly memorable and moving. However, "The Reader" is an addition to the genre that it is hard to welcome.
Directed by Stephen Daldry ("The Hours"), technically it is superb. The acting is fine with an outstanding performance by Kate Winslet as Hanna, a former concentration camp guard who betrays no understanding, let alone guilt, for her actions both at Auschwitz and at a fire and yet shows kindness in assisting a young man in the grip of scarlet fever who becomes the reader of the story (David Kross as the youth and Ralph Fiennes as the man). The make-up and cinematography are first class.
The problem is the narrative, which jumps backwards and forwards between 1958, 1966 and 1984, based on a bestselling German novel by Bernard Schlink. Things might be clearer in the book but, in the film, the motivations of the leading characters are utterly opaque and the central message of the work is totally unclear, leaving this viewer anyway perplexed and unsatisfied with a story which seems morally confusing if not vacuous.