THE READER
IS A SURPRISING FILM:
NAZIS CAN BE SYMPATHETIC,
THOUGH NOT FORGIVEN
The Reader starts off almost like a German Summer of '42 except
it's 1958 and it doesn't take place in the summer -- well, some of it
does. My point is that, other than advance publicity of the film, you'd
never know it had the serious overtones that eventually intrude into
our midst.
It is also misleading in that Ralph Fiennes, one of the two
top-lined stars of the film, is barely in it, while Kate Winslet, the
other billed star is being touted for supporting actress, though she is
pivotal throughout the piece.
The main star is David Kross, a hitherto unknown 18-year-old German
actor, who speaks English flawlessly and is utterly captivating as a
young boy we first meet at fifteen, who serendipitously meets an older
woman with whom he has an eventful, albeit brief, affair.
Kross portrays the young Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes plays him
interspersed in the film already grown-up) and after feeling queasy on
the bus ride home from school he gets off and throws up in the
courtyard of an apartment building. Then, Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate
Winslet, comes home from work and at first scolds the boy for making a
mess. Her better nature takes hold and she helps Michael to recover and
then insists upon walking him home.
He is diagnosed with Scarlet Fever, but the normally ominous
consequences do not occur and he recovers perfectly after recuperating
for three months, frankly making us wonder what was the point? When he
is out of bed he tells his mother about Hanna's help, and he is
instructed to write a note of thanks, which he embellishes to a bouquet
of flowers and it leads to lust.
What ensues is a lovely tale of love during which Hanna is very
inquisitive and intrigued by his studies. As part of their foreplay he
reads to her from a myriad of classics ranging from The Odyssey to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and regales her switching his delivery and accent to conform to the
style and text of each book. Then their tryst ends very suddenly and
without any warning. Hanna leaves without a trace, and Michael is
forced to suffer silently and go on about his life.
Throughout all this, we cut back and forth to glimpses of grown-up
Michael's life as a successful lawyer, and his anxiety because he is
about to be reunited with his somewhat estranged daughter.
Then pop, we go back in time and meet a now 23-year-old Michael
(Kross again) in law school, where he takes a sparsely populated legal
seminar led by Professor Rohl, played genuinely and to the point by
Bruno Ganz. As part of the course he takes his students to see a real
trial in action, and this is where the story takes off and
reverberates. Six women are being prosecuted as former Nazi prison
guards, and Michael is shocked to see that one of them is Hanna Schmitz.
What transpires is a mix of disbelief, revulsion and a sense of
profound guilt, because he finds himself in the position to help
mitigate the charges against her, but for reasons not too clear he
falls short at the last minute. His shame obsesses him throughout the
years until a package arrives at the prison where Hanna is now serving
a life sentence, the contents of which manage to pick up and resume
their love affair over the years.
To say the film is poignant is an understatement, and that a
character such as Hanna's can have redemption is hard to believe. But
Kate Winslet succeeds much more in this film, and her character is far
more three dimensional than the role she played in Revolutionary Road.
David Kross is lovely and immensely sympathetic, even as he doesn't
quite do the right thing when he has the chance. He is attractive but
not enormously handsome and lends just the right innocence to the
earlier part of his role and the maturity when he is almost ten years
older.
Ralph Fiennes provides the wrap around and does so in an effective
manner, in the reunion with his daughter, his involvement with the
older Hanna and in an epilog of sorts with a concentration camp victim,
played by Lena Olin, whose book about being a survivor is what did
Hanna in so many years earlier.
I'm not sure the scene between Fiennes and Olin is as realistic as
such an encounter would be and it seems a bit jerky and pretentious,
though Olin is quite credible and lovely living a very successful
Manhattan life still afflicted with the pain suffered during World War
II.
On the whole David Hare has written a fascinating and engrossing script, based on the book Der Vorleser
by Bernhard Schlink. Director Stephen Daldry has given us a taut and
emotional filmmaking achievement to go hand in hand with his earlier
and dissimilar works, The Hours and Billy Elliot. It
is altogether a shame that this film, with its unexpected story line
and odd events, will probably not reap lots of money, but hopefully the
major awards purveyors will yield the necessary nominations to attract
the resulting larger audience, which it surely deserves.
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