What Would Any One of Us Have Done If We Were Germans During Hitler's Rise?

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2009)

In this romantic drama, a young German, who has information that might prove the partial innocence of a woman about to be sentenced to life in prison, keeps it hidden. He hasn't the courage to reveal his affair with this woman to anyone outside of the two of them. By making this decision, he shifts the film's focus from the subject of German guilt about the Holocaust and turns it on the human race in general. The story means his choice as the key to its significance, but most of us American viewers will resolve that the movie is about the war crimes of the Nazis and their reaction by post-war German generations. Though I have always been interested in the coping post-WWII societies who committed the most pivotal atrocities of the war, namely Germany and Japan, that's not what the film meant to me. I found Kate Winslet's performance, and frankly her nude beauty, entranced me, and I was entrenched in a sort of existential concern for the well-laid plot in terms of how it affected her.
This wise historical psychological drama's basic premise is a sexual relationship between Winslet, a mysterious and emotionally withholding woman in her mid-30s, and a 15-year- old boy played by David Kross. Whether or not such things are wrong, which really they aren't, or socially illicit, which they generally are, is not concerned here. The only thing that matters to the kid being intensely absorbed in the discovery of his sexuality. We are unsure of what matters to her, and perhaps she is, too, but the reality is there. She is aloof yet demanding with sex, it being obvious to her that a 15-year-old virgin would have absolutely no problem with that, but it seems to care more that he read to her. The film's three-time Oscar-nominated, BAFTA- and Tony-winning director Stephen Daldry depicts them almost entirely through nudity because when they are together, they are about nothing else.
It happens, and the story, to me, is about the surprise life holds for a transitory relationship of both intense passion and total anonymity, how it links her earlier life and his later one. It is told in a flashback format and powerfully acted by Winslet and Kross, with Ralph Fiennes coldly enigmatic as the elder version of the character. The film is marketed as being as if Fiennes is the male lead, but Winslet and Kross are the core essence of the movie. This digital feature, only Daldry's third film and yet his third critical success, begins with Fiennes parting awkwardly with a one-night stand before watching an S-Bahn pass by outside, which leads us to flash back to another tram in 1958 Neustadt. An unhappy-looking teenaged Kross gets off but wanders around the streets. The following is shot almost entirely in shadows and silhouettes: He finally pauses in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he starts to vomit. The tram conductor, a woman, yes, her, comes by and coldly, pragmatically helps him.
Winslet's character, who puts up a dominant, almost masculine, front, is indirectly deconstructed by not only a shocked Kross but characters who truly haven't met her before the surprising revelation about her. They get nowhere. One can't forgive what we learn she's done, but is that all there is to her? There is pressure in all societies to do what everyone else is doing, pressure much bigger than any single society. What would we have done if we were Germans during Hitler's rise? If we had been Jewish, we would've tried to flee, and we'd either be lucky or not so much. But if we weren't? Bernhard Schlink's story is a realization that many people are like these two characters, and nearly all of us have secrets that we would do unforgivable things to keep.