What is worse: to be responsible for the deaths of 300 defenseless women or to not know your ABCs? If The Reader is to be believed, it is the latter. This Oscar-bait production did achieve that goal. On just about every other level, The Reader is boring, slow, pretentious and frankly off-putting.
Shifting from a reunified Germany in 1995 to the former West Germany of 1958 and in between, we see the story of love and death. Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is awaiting a visit from his daughter, Julia (Hannah Herzsprung). Michael does love Julia, but he is also estranged from her. He then floats to his past.
In 1958, 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) comes down with what he first thinks is a cold. It turns out to be scarlet fever. After finally emerging from his forced isolation, Michael goes to thank the woman who brought him home that first day of his illness. That woman is Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a tram conductress. He helps her get coal. She helps him lose his virginity.
It takes virtually no time for her to take his clothes off, take her clothes off and begin schtupping a minor. Hanna, our child predator, loves having Michael read to her. He reads all sorts of things to her ranging from Homer's Odyssey to Lady Chatterley's Lover. Curiously, she finds the latter disgusting and tells him so, while the 36-year-old woman is soaking in the bathtub with a 15-year-old boy. Michael is so thoroughly besotted with his hunny to where he would rather spend all his free time with her than with friends his own age. However, without notice, Hanna cuts off the affair and disappears.
We move to 1966. Michael is now a law student, and an important case is gripping the nation. Six women who had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity are facing trial. They were SS guards who were forcing 300 Jewish women and children to march through Poland. On a fateful night, Allied bombs had accidentally struck a church where the prisoners were being held. Rather than let the women and children escape, the female SS guards forced them to stay inside the burning church. Michael is shocked to find that one of those women was his older lover, Hanna.
His devastation is compounded during the testimonies. A survivor recounts how Hanna seemed to be kinder than the other female guards by picking the weakest ones from immediate execution. That perception shifted when the other Auschwitz inmates learned that Hanna had the young girls go to her quarters and read to her. If they did more than read to her, one can only speculate. The trial reaches a climax when the SS guards joint report is brought out. Who wrote it? The defendants quickly turn on each other and blame Hanna alone for their collective crimes. Hanna, rather than hand over handwriting samples, admits to everything.
It is now that Michael realizes Hanna's shocking secret: she cannot read. The trial is over, with Hanna sentenced to life imprisonment. Despite all this, Michael cannot fully let Hanna go. Eventually, he sends her audio tapes of the stories that he read to her. She uses them to learn to read and write. It is now 1988, but will Hanna be able to make it in the new Germany? Will Michael heal from being The Reader?
In We Saw Your Boobs, Kate Winslet came in for particular mockery. "And Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures, and Jude, and Hamlet, and Titanic, and Iris, and Little Children, and The Reader, and whatever you're shooting now", the song goes. I am of very mixed emotion on this topic. I can see why MacFarlane and others have pointed out how often Winslet is seen nude on film. I think the We Saw Your Boobs number is crass, vulgar and insulting (dragging Scarlett Johannson's unauthorized photos into this parade was a particularly low blow). However, it becomes hard to argue for the artistic merits of The Reader's nudity when one looks at it.
Is it a good or bad thing that we get to see both Kate Winslet and David Kross nude? They both are fully frontal at some points. I am again of mixed emotions here. The Reader sees itself as being artistic, perhaps avant-garde, during these nude scenes. I found it a mix of prurient and pretentious. I can see my way to there being some nudity in the film. However, late in The Reader, the imprisoned Hanna is seen washing herself before she is sentenced. We did not have to see her boobs here.
I feel that I have wandered way off when it comes to reviewing The Reader. I fear that I will wander off into a whole other topic. The Reader veers dangerously close to making Hanna at minimum a victim and at most some kind of heroine. The film, to my mind, seems to imply that we should think well of Hanna because she eventually learned to read and write. It does not seem very interested in how she committed statutory rape. It does not seem very interested that she allowed defenseless women and children to be burned to death. There is a certain coldness, a certain remoteness, from Hanna's actions with Michael and with those women and children. If memory serves right, what exactly Hanna had her favorites do separate from reading to her is not openly stated. Given what she had Michael do, the suggestion of sex is strongly implied.
All this paint Hanna as pretty monstrous. Her lack of literacy is not something to have us focus on. Moreover, there is something almost cartoonishly symbolic that Hanna opted to off herself on top of books. It is as if director Stephen Daldry decided we needed to gild the lily by having Hanna end things with books helping her.
In terms of performances, The Reader is best remembered as the film which won Kate Winslet her first Best Actress Oscar. Winslet was on her sixth nomination when The Reader was released. I cannot feel but think that there was an overdue narrative building for Winslet and that said narrative got her the Oscar. I cannot say that it was a bad performance. I thought I heard a German accent popping out every so often. I found it a bit hit and miss. I also found Winslet to be a bit removed from things. When she had her big Oscar-clip moment, there was nothing there, at least for me. As she defended the guards' decision to not let the prisoners escape the burning church, she states that they were guards. "We were responsible for them!" Hanna says.
As I think of Kate Winslet's performance in The Reader, I come to my conclusion that it was efficient but not revelatory.
To be fair, many other actors in the film did the same kind of "this is a serious story" type of acting. That kind of acting is stodgy and oddly lifeless. Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael Berg suffered from this. It was hard to accept that this man felt anything given how stiff he came across. It made it harder to accept given that the adult Michael had a British accent and the younger Michael had a German accent. Bruno Ganz in his small role as Michael's law professor was there just to ask questions. He too was very serious but remote.
Michael's family was similarly serious and remote. When the adult Michael goes with Julia to his widowed mother's home, the mother coldly says that he did not come home for his father's funeral but instead to tell her he's getting divorced. This scene is so stiff it veers close to farce.
David Kross as the younger Michael is the only one who seems to act. His hesitation with the older woman, his initial ecstasy and eventual heartbreak are well-played. Kross was given the same material as everyone else. However, he was miles ahead of everyone else because we could see and feel Michael's conflict. Granted, there were a few moments when Kross was off. There was a fight between Michael and Hanna that looked unreal when he complains that it is his 16th birthday and she makes no notice of it.
Nico Muhly's score adds to the faux somberness of The Reader. To be fair, it is hard to know which parts were filmed by cinematographer Roger Deakins and which were filmed by cinematographer Chris Menges. They received one of The Reader's five Oscar nominations. The film's others for Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Lead Actress are a bit curious to me.
I wonder if people go back to the serious but remote The Reader for repeated viewing. If so, I wonder if they think well of Hanna Schmitz. She has sexual relations with a minor. She was an SS guard. She let 300 women and children burn to death rather than run the risk of them escaping. At least she eventually learned to read and write. Triumphing over illiteracy makes up for crimes against humanity, I suppose.
