This movie has been getting a lot of mixed reviews right now, and I really can’t understand why. I was expecting a good movie with great performances when I went in to see “The Reader” today, but I ended up getting a lot more than I realized. My father was with me when I saw the movie, and he confirmed that it was astonishingly faithful to the book it was based on. Indeed, the movie is an emotionally devastating journey through the beginning of an affair between a young student and an older woman and the aftermath that the affair lays on both of them. Every single performance in this movie is extraordinary, none the least of which is the one given by Kate Winslet. If she does indeed get nominated for her performance in this and/or “Revolutionary Road,” she will certainly deserve her Oscar this time around.
Kate plays Hanna Schmitz who works as a ticket taker for the local trains going in and out of the town, and she encounters young Michael Berg (David Kross plays him as a teenager) who is sick and depressed. She takes care of him and even walks him home. Michael later returns to where she lives to thank her for what she did, and from there the two fall into a secret affair which involves both love making and reading. Hanna asks Michael to read to her before they have sex, and he does so with tremendous enthusiasm to say the least. This deepens their relationship even while it remains a secret between the two of them, and it lasts for several months.
Then suddenly, Hanna vanishes from Michael’s life leaving him confused and heartbroken, and he moves on to law school. But during the course of a trial in which Michael and several law students have been invited to, he reencounters Hanna as she is one of the defendants on trial for crimes against humanity. It turns out that she was an SS guard during the Holocaust, and worked in camps such as Auschwitz where many Jews were cruelly put to death. This creates an immense conflict for Michael in that he may be able to help her, but to do so would reveal their affair and implicate him in a situation that he will never be able to escape from ever. While their affair only lasted for a summer, the effects of that relationship end up lasting a lifetime for both characters.
The movie moves back and forth in time as we see what Michael Berg goes through as a young person, and then we see him as the adult he has become and what the impact of that affair has done to his personality. As an adult, he is portrayed by Voldemort himself, Ralph Fiennes, and he shows how Michael has become closed off in many ways and is not as open with people as he should. Everything he does comes back to the affair he had with Hanna so many years ago. The moving back and forth in time could have been horrendously irritating, but director Stephen Daldry does it so seamlessly that it never ever seems like an unnecessary gimmick.
Part of the movie’s success in affecting you may depend on how much of yourself you see in the character of Michael Berg. Many of us would not like to remember ourselves as a weak person, but something deep in our subconscious would have certainly entertained the idea of having an affair with an older woman, let alone Kate Winslet. As a teenager, your hormones are jumping up and down on an ever expanding trampoline in the realm of puberty, so thinking about something other than girls will be a bit challenging. All the same, common sense might kick in somewhere and that just might stop us from being involved in that kind of relationship.
In many ways, “The Reader” is in effect an argument against that kind of a relationship as we see that this one elicits even more heartache, confusion, and of emotional scars that can last throughout a whole lifetime. They say the first love is always the hardest because of the eventual break up which can hurt like a son of a bitch. Clearly, there are not many break ups or separations that can hurt as much as the one experienced by Michael and Hanna.
2008 may be remembered as the year of Batman, the late Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr., and of many other things. I do hope that it is also known as the year of Kate Winslet. On top of “The Reader,” she also has “Revolutionary Road” coming up which is directed by her husband Sam Mendes. She needn’t have been nominated for an Oscar 5 times already to convince us of what a superb actress she is. She manages to do many things that I cannot see another actress doing as effectively, and she superbly handles the aging of her character without overdoing it or falling into some caricature of an elderly person that we may have some preconception of. She immerses herself into this role ever so fearlessly, and she gives us one of the most compelling and emotionally devastating performances of this past year.
She also does something which at first would seem unthinkable and horrifying; she gives a human face to the SS officers who were later prosecuted for their role in the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. From a distance, we would simply distance ourselves from these people because of the horrible things they have done. Winslet wisely does not make us sympathize with what her character has done, but she makes us see the pain of her character throughout the trial as she is caught up in a situation that she does not entirely understand. This later leads to a revelation about Hanna which I will not reveal here as it will simply destroy the mystery of her character for the audience this movie deserves. But this secret is something that Hanna feels much more ashamed of than her role in the murder of so many Jews.
It also brings up an interesting point worth dwelling on. These officers are being prosecuted for their role in an atrocity of the worst kind, and probably rightly so. I say probably because in the end, these are just soldiers who were ordered to do their jobs by a genocidal maniac named Adolf Hitler. As history shows, the hierarchy of an evil or highly immoral regime seems to get off somewhat easier than the soldiers whom, whether we agree with their actions or not, were simply doing the job they were commanded to do. For them to simply not do their duties would have probably led to their deaths by a simple bullet in the head. Obviously, the atrocity of the Holocaust brought on a strong need for revenge in its aftermath, and prosecutors went after perhaps the only ones who could easily be prosecuted (Hitler killed himself before he could ever be captured). While I watched the movie, my dad leaned over to me and said:
“Just remember this when they prosecute those soldiers from Abu Ghraib and not Donald Rumsfeld.”
As much as this may seem (from a distance anyway) like the Kate Winslet show, there are many other performances to admire in “The Reader” other than hers. The one performance that might come across as the most underrated in the wake of the praise she deserves is the one given by David Kross as the young Michael Berg. Throughout all the scenes he has with Kate, he more than holds his own with her as he conveys the hell of an emotional turmoil that he is forever going through both as a teenager, and later as an adult. In retrospect, David really has the hardest role in the entire movie as he has to convey many things about his character without saying a word. We know why Michael is going through so many conflicting emotions, but the characters around him don’t know that. On top of that, they cannot know as that would implicate Michael in a situation that he will not ever be able to escape from. I have not heard of David Kross before, and I am interested to see how he got the role in the movie. His performance is nothing short of astonishing.
And of course, we have the always great Ralph Fiennes as the adult Michael Berg, and he conveys how the character has never fully moved on from the affair he had so many years ago. Ralph portrays him as a man who knows that he is more emotionally distant from people than he should, and he is aided by David’s performance in that we see why this is the case. Throughout his performance, he shows how the affections he has for Hanna have never stopped, and yet they still cannot be revealed for what they will show. The everlasting effects that this affair has had on David have informed the person that he has become, and Fiennes brings us to the adult Michael as he tries to reconcile those feelings to Hanna the only way he can, by reading to her.
Lena Olin also has a terrific cameo as a Holocaust survivor who testified against Hanna and many others for their role in World War II. She shows us in only a few minutes what it really means to be a survivor of such a horrific event in history, and of how one needs to move on past it in a way that may seem cold yet very understandable.
Director Stephen Daldry had previously directed the film adaptation of “The Hours” with Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. With that and “The Reader,” he seems to be working with a recurring theme of women caught up in a world they want to escape from. Even if that escape lasts only a brief moment, they are caught up in a world not necessarily of their own making, and it threatens to kill their very soul completely. Daldry certainly isn’t afraid to venture into emotionally charged material, or of material that many will simply view as depressing. Both of the movies mentioned are a journey into doomed relationships and of the damage inflicted through them.
Having said all this, I’m still surprised that this movie has elicited some negative reviews. In a sense, I can see why some see this movie as going on for far too long as it covers the affair from its sensuous beginnings to its tragic end, but to see this relationship all the way to its inevitable conclusion is important as it informs us of how strong the connection was between these two even when they were not in close proximity to one another. It is a brilliantly conceived movie by Stephen Daldry which is aided by a fantastic script by David Hare. To cut the movie off at a certain point would have certainly had a negative effect on how the audience viewed their relationship. This is a relationship that needed to be seen all the way to the end, for its main character of Michael Berg still has a story he needs to get off of his chest.
Like in “Doubt,” “The Reader” does not lay any sort of judgment on its characters and invites its audience to do that themselves. There are no easy answers to be found here, and many questions may remain with you after you have seen this movie, which is precisely the point. It forces you to put yourself in the shoes of Michael Berg and to ask what you would have done if you were him. You may not like the answers you come up with, but the questions are very important nevertheless.
“The Reader” is pretty certain at this point to have a place on my list of the best movies of 2008, and not just for the brilliant performance given by Kate Winslet. At the same time, there should now be no doubt that she is one of the very best actresses working in film today.
In closing, Sam Mendes is a very lucky man, dammit.
**** out of ****
