The Reader [movies]
Spoiler warning….
I’m not entirely sure what to think of The Reader. It’s such a slow, plodding and exhausting epic about love and justice, that a part of me wants to cast it off as another movie that’s too rich for its own good, both in plot and in aesthetics. But a part of me respects the simplicity of the story…that a boy can fall in love with a woman, get separated from her, and then come to aid in the only way he knows how when she arguably needs him the most. It’s a gorgeous way to show love, the act of telling someone a story for company, forming a love that was born out of innocent curiosity, later blossomed into the most essential spiritual survivalism. It’s too bad this love can’t overshadow the guilt and controversy that inhabit the soul of this movie. Yes, this is a WWII movie, another in the line of Holocaust movies that Hollywood seemingly can’t stop producing year in and year out. And while we may want to treat the subject with respect, there’s no hiding the fact that we may be just about at our wit’s end with this exploration of humanity’s collective guilt, whether it’s amplified to the battlegrounds, or shrunk down to the interplay between two people. It’s a credit to The Reader’s quality that you walk away from it feeling like it wasn’t a waste of your time…but that in itself isn’t much of a compliment.
Told in flashback form, the film follows the mind of Michael as a young 15 year old boy in Berlin who falls ill with scarlet fever on a tram. Helped by a tram operator, Hanna, he later goes to thank her and ends up falling in love with her. He spends his time cutting class and spending time with Hannah, reading her books, which later exposes the fact that Hanna cannot read. After he grows out of the relationship, Michael attends law school, where as part of a seminar attending the criminal trials of Auschwitz officers, he finds himself observing the trial of Hannah who’s convicted and sentenced to life in prison after she refuses to give a handwriting sample, still ashamed of the fact that she cannot read or write. Michael, out of guilt from never coming forward with the truth, sends her tapes of him reading her books so she can listen to them while she serves out her sentence.
It’s an odd feeling, to feel such sympathy for a woman who admits to participating in the extermination of women and children at Auschwitz, and yet…you do. Winslet’s performance conveys an almost alarming strength beneath her sustained vulnerability, you can see how Hanna could rationalize her actions as she does on the stand. She was a guard, her job was to guard prisoners, and what happened to them was none of her concern. And yet, with Fiennes bearing most of the guilt in the movie, there’s a certain…horribleness to Hanna’s answer to Michael’s question when he first sees her in prison. He so desperately wants her to feel guilt for her actions, and the fact that she doesn’t gives him no recourse and no relief. In the end, her act of suicide was the only satisfying end to Michael, even though he never wanted to admit it, and gave him the freedom to tell the story that he’s been holding back for so many years; a kind of sick validation to his inability to come forward with the truth that would’ve mitigated her sentence. Her punishment was not his to give, nor was it the law’s or the families’ that she affected. It was her decision to join the SS, and thus her punishment would be her cross to bear, whether thru living a life racked with guilt or subjecting herself to suicide because she could not find the guilt that Michael, and really the world required of her.
This complexity is what makes the movie so gorgeous to take in, but isn’t enough to save it from being overwrought with a forced seriousness and sadness that in the end, loses your attention. Who’d want to immerse themselves in a world where everyone is paralyzed by guilt (*cough* ATONEMENT)? As a result, you’re distanced from the movie, watching the events play out from a cold, objective viewpoint. Deakins’ shooting is beautiful, and Daldry (if he can learn to tighten it up) will do an admirable job with his next project (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay!!!), but The Reader simply feels like a movie that no one would ever REALLY want to see. It’s a thick, dense book that sits on your shelf that you avoid for weeks, months, or even years knowing you’ll never have the patience or dedication to get through it. And in the end, it rewards you with another message about the ghosts and guilt that the Holocaust produced. It’s a message that we haven’t forgotten about as a society, but don’t need to revisit in this form, where it’s shoehorned as a way to produce the central conflict of the story and a lazy coda of an ending.
The Reader is a rich, complex, and somber film that muddies up a gorgeous love story with a sagging message about guilt and justice that never fully gels on screen. It’s one of those movies where objectively, I can’t really say anything bad about it. The performances were great (Kate Winslet, say HELLOOOO to Oscar), the directing and cinematography were fantastic, everything about it was superb. It just wasn’t that enjoyable an experience.
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