a film of two stories

Rating: 9/10 (30 May 2009)

There are two stories or if you want two different films in this film.
The first one is a wonderful love story, starting the 1950s Germany trying to cope with the trauma of the war and of the defeat and to build itself back as a nation and as a country. Michael is a 15 years old teenager discovering love, life and himself. Hanna is 20 years older, a simple woman trying to break the walls of a lonely life. Their relationship starts on a purely sexual way but soon turns into something else, as she starts asking him to read to her loudly from his school literature books. Reading becomes the center and the focus of their affair. One day however she disappears.
We find them almost a decade later, when he is a student in law and she is on the accused bank of a SS camp guardians trial, accused of war crimes. He feels betrayed twice by her disappearance, and by her having said nothing about her past. When the occasion comes to ease her punishment by revealing that she is not able to read he fails to do it, he is too ashamed, she is too ashamed, and social conventions again win over truth.
The final part of the relationship is sublime. He is now mature, she is old and in prison. He starts sending her recordings of his readings of the preferred book, she finally starts to understand the evil she caused and also the reasons of failure and learns to read and write. It is a relationship that is no longer physical but only spiritual but it still gets only stronger. When liberation time approaches however, Hanna cannot cope with real life - the physical world and and a real relationship with Michael have no meaning for her.
The second film or story is a Holocaust theme, but not the usual one. The film happens many years after the war, but the shade of the Holocaust is planing over the whole story. Hanna was one of the blind executioners, her evil deeds had nothing ideological, just reflected the moral decay of the world she lived in. For many years after the war she just lives, does not seem to have any remorse or think too much about what happened. Her process of acknowledging comes late and is not well expressed, she is not a character that explains herself well by any means. The world around here judges and condemns her, but not even the judges have a good answer to the question she asks at the trial'what would you have done in my place?'. It is not that the good answer does not exist, letting 300 Jews burn alive in a church rather than releasing them and risking 'disorder' is obviously the evil choice - but it is the new society that may not be yet strong and good enough to give the appropriate answer.
The way the theme of the Holocaust is dealt in this film cannot avoid controversy. Both heroes of the film make at given moments of the story the wrong choices, and none of their tentatives of atonement can really compensate or fix what happened, Many people could read in the telling of such a story by itself a tentative of humanizing the wrong-doers and seeking excuses for the unspeakable. The real answer is given I believe in one of the final scenes, when a survivor of the Holocaust refuses to make any judgments, learn or teach any lessons based on one happened in the camp. This is again a disputable position, but a possible one.
Kate Winslet is superb in the role of Hanna, rendering the character with all its simplicity, naivety, lack of sensitivity in many moments tenderness in other, mis-communication, and humanity. For once the Academy may not have been wrong. Her German partner, young actor David Kross succeeds to match her beautifully as the young Michael. I liked less Ralph Fiennes as the mature Michael, but then I seldom like Fiennes. Overall this film asks a lot of important questions and provides back answers that will not make everybody happy, but it's a complex story and the answers cannot be simple. The film did not enjoy too much success, maybe there is a level of saturation because of too many Holocaust movies lately, but 'The Reader' will I think get in time the status of one of the important films of the genre.