The Reader (2008)

Nominated for Best Picture of 2008, The Reader is a Holocaust movie without the Holocaust. As a 15-year-old boy in the post-war Germany of 1958, Michael Berg begins an affair with an older woman who takes a moment to comfort him when he gets sick with scarlet fever. After this initial chance meeting, he begins visiting her apartment, and they begin having sex on a regular basis there. He even skips classes and leaves his friends to be with her, and he plans a biking holiday for them in the German countryside that the film showcases in beautiful cinematography. The catch to all of this is that the older woman, Hanna Schmitz, asks him to read to her each time they are together. Whether this is an act of foreplay or whether she is doing it for other reasons, the viewer does not know until later in the film. The summer they spend together, though, profoundly affects Michael for the rest of his life.

Hanna disappears one day, and Michael (who has fallen in love with her) has to wait until he is in law school in 1966 before he sees her again. She and five other women who were guards in a concentration camp during World War II are now on trial for their war crimes, particularly the act of letting hundreds of Jewish women die in a burning church rather than opening the doors to the building and allowing them to survive and perhaps escape. Hanna, in particular, answers all of the questions asked of her in court honestly, sometimes brutally so. She does not appear to be a woman who has thought much about the consequences of her actions, at least on the surface.

A third thread of the narrative deals with Michael's reconciliation in 1988 with Hanna after she has been imprisoned for many years. (No, I promise I'm not spoiling the ending here.) In this portion of the film, Michael is played by Ralph Fiennes, who had quite a year in 2008. He's good here, particularly because the role suits the kinds of tamped-down performance that Fiennes often gives. By the way, these different narratives are not told in strictly chronological order; most of them are intertwining remembrances that Michael has as he contemplates reuniting with Hanna, so you see Fiennes throughout the film. There's also a portion of the film that deals with events in 1995, as Fiennes' Michael prepares to meet his grown daughter for dinner.

Hanna is played beautifully by Kate Winslet. Winslet has become an even more expressive, powerful actress as she has matured. I loved and admired her performance a few years ago in Little Children, and this role manages to top that one. What makes her acting so remarkable here is the ability she has to contain her emotions. Hanna has reasons for not expressing herself, and Winslet allows us to see only slivers of feelings now and then, keeping us guessing until the revelation of Hanna's reasons are made clear. Another actress would not have been as subtle or effective. Winslet's acting here is among the best I've seen in several years from anyone, male or female, and no, I've not seen her work in Revolutionary Road yet, so save those comments until I am able to make the comparisons myself. Hanna could easily be one of the most evil of characters in less capable hands--she certainly seems emotionally rigid, even in the love scenes with young Michael--but thanks to Winslet's talent, just as we are about to dismiss Hanna for her actions or her behaviors or her attitude, we are given a small bit of insight into her character. It's never enough to make you "love" Hanna, certainly, but you do begin to comprehend her in ways that you wouldn't have thought possible. She manages to elicit a tiny bit of sympathy for a woman who might not fully deserve it.

I also want to talk about the young performer who plays Michael as a 15-year-old and then as a law school student. His name is David Kross, and he's an 18-year-old German boy. He's astonishing in his early scenes with Winslet. He has a depth and maturity to his acting far beyond what his age might suggest. I particularly admired how his face would light up each time he was with Winslet during the romantic scenes; there's a glow to him that suggests what being a young person in love for the first time is really like. Watch those scenes where they're on vacation together to see what I mean. He also is good at conveying just how painful it is when they are apart from each other. Admittedly, he's not as strong when he has to play a young man of about 23. I think that's the age he would be when he's a student if I've done my math correctly. He's perhaps just a bit too baby-faced to play that age convincingly. However, the scenes where he has to watch Hanna's testimony are still gut-wrenching. Both he and Winslet are at the top of their game in those courtroom scenes.

So why is this a Holocaust film without the Holocaust? There are no flashbacks to the camps, only stories about some of the events that took place there. We never to get to see directly what Hanna is accused of doing. The film never even shows us Hanna's life before she meets Michael on the train that day he is sick. It just jumps from the 1950s to the 1960s when Hanna is on trial, and it doesn't provide us with a great deal of exposition about any of those years in between either. Lena Olin, who's stunningly good here in two brief scenes as a mother and then her daughter, appears near the end of the film to give us a context for understanding all of those plays and books and other works (films?) about the Holocaust from the perspective of a survivor, and I think she's there primarily to remind us that this film should be examined for its take on the guilt that we carry or perhaps should carry for what we have done in the past. She tells Fiennes' grown-up Berg to go to the theater if he wants catharsis, a rather grown-up reaction to the subject matter.

The director of The Reader is Stephen Daldry. He's made three feature films: Billy Elliot, The Hours, and now The Reader, and he's been nominated for Best Director for each one. I don't know of anyone else who can claim such a track record. What stands out for me about his films, though, is how he seems to be very selective about the material he directs. Each of the three is, in its own ways, serious and literate and "adult." The Reader is a movie designed to make us ponder our own measure of culpability, our own decisions in life. It doesn't supply simple answers to what are truly complex and complicated questions, and that's why I think it's an admirable choice among the nominees for Best Picture of 2008.