Tuesday
23Dec2008
Movie Review - 'The Reader'
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 1:20AM | The Reader
Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph
Fiennes, and David Kross  |
You
should not feel comfortable watching
The Reader. There are so many things about
it that should crawl under your skin, that should push your morality one way or
another. Based on Bernard Schlink's bestselling book, The Reader tackles a lot of weighty subjects, what would qualify as statutory rape and the Holocaust among them. But director Stephen Daldry (The Hours) never uses these extremes as extremes, presenting them as smaller parts of a bigger life. That life belongs to Michael Berg, whom we meet in the 1990s as Ralph Fiennes. Berg soon flashes back to when he was a teenager in the late 1950s (David Kross). Never a sickly boy, he nonetheless comes down with Scarlet Fever. The first symptoms are revealed as he is taken in by a public transit worker named Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). He is awestruck by her, but not she by him.
When he returns home later that night, the doctor tells Michael he must stay in bed for several weeks. As soon as he's well enough to leave the house, he pays Hanna a return visit to thank her for her kindness, and as if it was preordained, they make love. It's not the last time. Over the course of a few months, Michael and Hanna meet at her one-room apartment, and after he reads to her, the 36-year-old woman and the 15-year-old boy have sex.
Eight years later, Michael encounters Hanna again. He is a law student observing the trial of several guards at an Auschwitz satellite camp near Krakow, Poland. One of the guards is Hanna Schmitz. Was this the same woman he read to all those years ago? Was she responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Jews in a gruesome fire?
Michael does not speak to Hanna during this time; he can not bring himself to. He feels sickened, repulsed, but at the same time, he begins to realize that his time with Hanna as a 15-year-old may hold a key to her innocence, relatively speaking. After all, she was still a guard at a concentration camp, so we're really only weighing the degree of her guilt.
Michael certainly weighs her guilt and while he never fully forgets Hanna, he distances himself from her memory for as long as he can. But like anything that feels so preordained, he can never fully escape her, finding a way back into her life - albeit from a great distance.
There is compassion in The Reader for Hanna Schmitz and I can not tell you whether or not that is the right approach or whether or not you should feel something for her beyond her connection with the Holocaust. That same message is conveyed through Winslet's own performance, one that never varies. She is stoic, does not want pity, and does not need. It's an incredibly brave choice for an actor to take on a lot of levels.
In support of her, both Fiennes and Kross display the same kind of internal torture. How can they rationalize their feelings, knowing what they know? By the same token, where does love end?
Colin Boyd | Permalink | in Adaptations, Kate Winslet, Reviews, The Reader | Print Article | Email Article | 4 Comments | Share Article
Reader Comments (4)
Yes, The Reader made me fidget and squirm uncomfortably in my seat, I was horrified. Did she ruin him, how could he still love her? How could he not. Did she love him?
David Kross performance was stellar. Winslet is a tour de force as the emotionally vacant Hanna. Ralph Fiennes and Lena Olin are very good.
I went thinking David Cross was going to be in this one. What a disappointment!
Of course, I'm still in love with Winslet's "Clementine" from ESOTSM (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), so...
I think I just Bluray'd myself...
lol AD rules
Kate just snagged a Critics Choice Award for her performance in 'The Reader,'
Hip Hip Hurrah!!!!!!!!!