An adaptation that adds something

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2009)

Salman Rushdie, in an essay on adaptation, remarked "Something is always lost in translation; and yet something can also be gained." This film adaptation from Bernhard Schlink's novel directed by Stephen Daldry, previously known for "Billy Elliot" and "The Hours" loses some of the depth of the novel, but at the same time Kate Winslett brings alive the central character of Hanne, the former SS guard in her thirties who has a brief affair with Michael the narrator when he is 15 years old far more vividly than Schlink was able to in the novel. David Hare's screenplay follows the novel fairly closely, but Kate Winslett, often by body language alone, is able to tell her character's story so as to make her understandable, if not forgivable. David Kross and Ralph Fiennes, the two actors playing Michael, who grows up to be a stiff legal academic (boy, do I know the type) also do a remarkable job.
The more stringent critics would say that nothing can be said in defence of Nazism, but they rather miss the point. Schlink and the movie makers are trying to explain why people can behave in such a terrible way, not to excuse what they did. Are the critics saying that Hanne should not have been portrayed as a physically attractive woman? Because she is attractive we can more readily accept that the narrator, at 15, will fall in love with her. He is, of course at that stage completely unaware of her history. He does not even notice that she cannot read. Later, when he knows the full story he is indeed consumed by guilt, but it his not the affair he is guilty about, but his failure to help her, his betrayal in fact.
This segues into the larger question of how can the post-war generation of Germans come to terms with what was done by many of their parents. Neither Schlink nor the film makers have an easy answer to this. Schlink writes "Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not have, morally or legally – for my generation of students it was a lived reality." It did produce a generation who were anti-Nazi. Schlink again "It converted the passive suffering of shame into energy, activity, aggression." As to losses in translation, the most irritating change was to recast the linear structure of the novel into flashbacks, which added nothing and made the story harder to follow. Some of the earlier scenes with Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael don't make much sense. But Kate Winslett carries the day with a gutsy and convincing performance.