The Reader is a Holocaust story that examines German war guilt from the post-World War II perspective. Based on Bernhard Schlink’s award winning 1995 novel, Der Vorleser, it stars David Kross (as the young Michael Berg, the reader the title refers to), ‘I’ve-been-in-every-movie-in-2008’, Kate Winslet (as Hanna Schmitz, the illiterate trolley car attendant with some dark secrets), and a somber Ralph Fiennes as Michael’s older, lonelier, lawyer self. After a sudden illness, the 15 year-old Michael ends up helped by the older Hanna and the two embark on an affair that’s one trolley stop short of pedophilia. Amid sex and fights and a cycling trip to the countryside, comes the reading: with Michael spending hours reading out loud to Hanna from many of the Western world’s greatest novels. Then, suddenly, one day she vanishes and Michael, devastated, moves on with his quiet life. A chance visit to a German court while studying for his law degree has him confronting his past when he realizes Hanna is in fact one of the prisoners under trial as a Nazi guard who helped dispatch women – young and old – to their deaths at Auschwitz. Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Reader pays off best in its early going when Hanna and Michael live out their love affair. The filming is gorgeous in a Merchant and Ivory sort of way and both Kross and Winslet’s shine amid the sparse words and great score. Despite the movie’s fine climatic moment when Hanna fires the judge’s own key question back at him as if asking all Germans, “What would you have done?” The Reader’s dénouement is all too made-for-TV.
My rating 7 out of 10.
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