Unsatisfying execution boosted by Winslet

Rating: 7/10 (24 January 2009)

The Reader, starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes and set against the backdrop of the Holocaust, is at times tiresome and plodding, offering a unique plot (boy has affair with older woman, finding out later she was a Nazi guard) and a strong performance by Winslet and very little else. Its main problem seems to be that it simply doesn’t know what it wants to tell the viewer, what lessons it wishes to impart. As a result, its identity shatters into the proverbial million little pieces, each less interesting than the last.
Michael Berg (David Kross) is 15 and on the verge of falling under two spells: first, scarlet fever, from which he recovers in a few months, and then Hanna (Winslet), the older woman who helps him when he becomes ill. It is from this latter spell, though, that Michael never recovers; he feels the impact of their short, summer affair until the end of the movie (forty years later).
As romances go, it’s pretty sweet for the teen: he gets to sleep with a sexy older woman who desires only one thing (other than his sinewy body, of course): for him to read to her whatever trips his fancy. It’s a symbiotic relationship; he’s happy to have found a kindred spirit and ecstatic - pardon the term - to find an outlet for his hormones. She, on the other hand, is happy for his company and to hear him recite works of classic literature.
But as all affairs do, theirs ends abruptly, with nary an explanation, and that’s the last young Michael sees of Hanna, until he’s in law school years later, and as a field trip he’s in the very courtroom where a group of female, ex-Nazi guards is being charged with war crimes. Lo and behold, one of the guards is Hanna! The story is related in flashback through the memories of the adult Michael, played by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes is a fine (ha) actor, of course, but it seems he’s always stuck with these repressed, completely controlled roles. Distant, Michael’s called in the movie, an emotional cipher. Michael attempts, for decades, to come to grips with two dilemmas: why did Hanna leave him, and is her alleged Nazi past true? For me, I didn’t much care about his first dilemma; of course she left him, because she’s like twice his age and he was the clingy, controlling type. I was more concerned with the latter dilemma, because the trailer leads you to believe there’s some dispute about that. But this isn’t a courtroom drama. It’s more of a romance melodrama with serious undertones about the choices we make and the responsibility we marshal. The suggestion is made in the movie that the German people are looking for someone on whom to pin the blame of the Holocaust, and who better than guards following orders? Really, the film has just one thing going for it, although it’s a doozy: Kate Winslet, who electrifies the screen even when she’s not on it. Her vulnerable, conflicted Hanna is nurturing and distant, just as Michael would turn out; we can only guess at her true feelings, but Winslet is so talented that with a mere glance she can turn our perceptions on edge. She is this film, inside and out, and the fact that she also gets naked doesn’t hurt matters.
The Reader perhaps overreached its goals, whatever they may be. It admirably tries to give us a main character who is not noble and good of heart in all things, but it fails to give us a solid reason to care about the proceedings other than as if we were being read a tale set in a faraway land in a distant time.