The somber The Reader is about chance encounters and fateful decisions, promiscuous hearts and even more promiscuous bodies, living with past sin and loving present sinners. Based on a novel by German author Bernard Schlink, The Reader is a thoughtful and solitary (if glaringly imperfect) meditation on national guilt as seen through the eyes of an individual, and the manner in which one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another.
In post-World War II Germany, a bout of scarlet fever brings together an open-faced and quick-to-smile 15-year-old boy, Michael Berg (David Kross), and a brusque woman more than twice his age, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). From this chance encounter, a forbidden romance begins. Every afternoon for the span of a summer, the upper class, well-educated high school student and the lower class, illiterate tram conductor share a bed, far away from the loveless corridors of his home and family. She calls him “kid”; he doesn’t even learn her name until numerous lovemaking sessions later. The older Hanna, a beautiful but solemn woman, strips her virginal lover of his clothes and inhibitions, a deflowering that, ironically enough, leads to a blossoming into manhood. In return, she asks for only one thing: that he read to her from the books he’s collected at school. Michael gladly engages in her preferred form of foreplay, opening intellectual horizons to which she’d never had access. Her natural state, a visage haunted by something unspeakable and unseen, disappears when he opens “Homer’s Odyssey,” “Huckleberry Finn” or “The Lady with the Little Dog.”
And just as quickly as it began, Hanna moves away without so much as a note of explanation, leaving behind a heartbroken boy who feels the pain of a child even as he recalls the pleasures of an adult. Nearly a decade later, while a law student observing a Nazi war crimes trial, Michael is stunned to find Hanna back in his life in a way he never thought possible. There, sitting before him is his childhood lover, a woman accused of heinous crimes during the war. Michael is transfixed by the trial, as if he were a motorist coming across a fresh, gory car accident. Eventually he must confront the truth about Hanna and decide whether reconciliation, to say nothing of affection, is even possible once you find out that someone you love is a monster.
This isn’t the first literary neo-classic film Stephen Daldry has directed. The man behind the Oscar-nominated The Hours has made a beautiful film in The Reader — too beautiful perhaps. The Reader talks out of both sides of its cinematic mouth, arguing that nothing good whatsoever came out of the Holocaust and warns of the dangers of exploiting this most palpable tragedy of the 20th century. And yet what is the film doing when Michael wanders through Auschwitz, lit to glossy perfection by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins? How can a film about barbarism be this beautiful? Pitying a concentration camp guard — and an unrepentant one at that who suffers from a skewed sense of reality, substituting stubborn ignorance when self-loathing is called for — is a tough sell. All the more so when she parades before us for half the film in lovely nakedness. But then that’s the point, isn’t it? Beauty that works ugliness? The film operates better if you read it as a metaphor of Michael’s generation grappling with those who went before them and the inevitable love/hate relationship that evolved.
The German people have been trying to reconcile their place in 20th century history since the close of the Second World War. Some want to ignore the past; others want to drag it continually into the light where it cannot be forgotten. And in the midst of it all, Germany continues to rebuild itself. Throughout this film and across it’s various time periods, we see Germany in a state of reconstruction, with bombed out structures being mended early on, and gigantic cranes modernizing old Europe in the latter segments (Ralph Fiennes plays Michael 30 years on). It is a fitting metaphor for a country and a people continually trying to restore and move on, yet always stumbling upon some old reminder of the past buried in the freshly poured foundation. It’s hard to forget the past when the gavels from war trials crash down all around you.
If the first half of The Reader is erotic and sensual, with naked bodies in various states of repose and impassioned lovemaking, the second half becomes increasingly antiseptic, an exercise in philosophy and morality and guilt. (That the great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz is there to shepherd us through helps quite a bit.) As the trial commences, with discussions on how society operates not by morality but by the rule and fear of law, The Reader becomes increasingly rote, the sensuality replaced by chastity and the fire of the bedroom replaced by the mechanics of the courtroom. Sadly, we and the film are the poorer for it.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
