Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes in Stephen Daldry's The Reader (2008)I saw this film two weeks ago, but it's taken me this long to finally write my review. There are two main reasons for this: first, I've been very busy (books don't read themselves, you know) and had to organize quite a bit, for the coming months; the other reason is that it has taken me a week to collect my thoughts on the film and its topic, and a week to work out how to write them out here. Let's hope the friut of my intellectual labour is ripe.
Ralph Fiennes plays lawyer Michael Berg, who as a 15-year-old boy in the late 1950s meets and embarkes on his first love affair with a woman twice his age, Hanna Schmitz, played by Winslet. As Berg comes of age, he falls in and out of love with Schmitz in the space of a year, eventually losing contact with her until she resurfaces when Michael is a law student as a defendant in a war crime trial as a result of her having worked as a concentration camp guard. However, Hanna is guarding a secret she feels more shameful than her past; a secret which, paradoxically, could help her at her trial.
Naturally, as a film about the holocaust from the non-Jewish perspective set in post-war Germany, its main argument centres around the theme of guilt and culpability, and the role of the law in determining who is to blame. It successfully manages to look at a Germany devastated and desperate to absolve itself in the eyes of the rest of the world as a country which committed a terrible mistake. The horror of the post-war generation towards that of its parents and teachers is particularly startling, and I certainly thought the immediate anger was powerfully represented. In one scene set in Michael's university, the teacher argues from a legal perspective that even though there is such thing as a morality based on right-and-wrong, society does not judge its behaviour on this, but rather what is legally sound. Therefore, if an argument supporting the extermination of sections of society is popular and convincing enough, then legally there is nothing wrong with this. In a later scene, an angry student counter-argues with the typical emotional response, summarising that the law can be wrong, and even dangerous. The teacher agrees, and yet urges Michael to take his knowledge of Hanna's secret to the court on the grounds of it being evidence and warning him not to allow his anger to condemn her to an unfair sentence. Michael refuses to take this advice, effectively allowing Hanna to suffer the rest of her life in prison. The issue is thus scaled down and subverted, forcing members of the audience to question not only their opinions of German guilt but also consider the extent of their humanity to those who showed none themselves. As far as I was concerned, my sympathy lay with both the victims of the holocaust and with those like Hanna, so easily duped into what is now generally regarded as such an ugly movement.
Unsurprisingly, Winslet is excellent, and undoubtedly deserved her Academy Award for her performance; though not her best performance, Winslet has certainly now established herself as a member of a very special club, and not a moment too soon. Special mention should also go out to German actor David Kross who managed to effortlessly portray the progession from 15-year-old Michael's naïvety to his more worldly anguish as a 22-year-old law student. Though Feinnes was equally good, his role in the film felt minimal in comparison, which was a shame, since his performance was elegantly nuanced, quietly delivering his lines with strong overtones of a man who finally understood what his teacher at university meant about the changing tides of legal morality.
My only real problem with the performances lies with what was very likely to have been a decision made by director Stephen Frears (of Billy Elliott fame). Why oh why, in an English-speaking film, did the characters speak with German accents? Such blatant signposting felt unnecessary and jarring, serving only to undermine the otherwise very good directorial influence, and cheapened the overall feel of the film, at times making it seem more like a feature-length episode of 'Allo 'Allo. This didn't go unnoticed by my Spanish friends who watched the film with me, and complained about their difficulty with understanding the dialogue without the subtitles.
Nevertheless, The Reader is a good, solid two hours of intelligent entertainment, worth watching, if you're into that sort of thing.
Four Stars.
Ralph Fiennes plays lawyer Michael Berg, who as a 15-year-old boy in the late 1950s meets and embarkes on his first love affair with a woman twice his age, Hanna Schmitz, played by Winslet. As Berg comes of age, he falls in and out of love with Schmitz in the space of a year, eventually losing contact with her until she resurfaces when Michael is a law student as a defendant in a war crime trial as a result of her having worked as a concentration camp guard. However, Hanna is guarding a secret she feels more shameful than her past; a secret which, paradoxically, could help her at her trial.
Naturally, as a film about the holocaust from the non-Jewish perspective set in post-war Germany, its main argument centres around the theme of guilt and culpability, and the role of the law in determining who is to blame. It successfully manages to look at a Germany devastated and desperate to absolve itself in the eyes of the rest of the world as a country which committed a terrible mistake. The horror of the post-war generation towards that of its parents and teachers is particularly startling, and I certainly thought the immediate anger was powerfully represented. In one scene set in Michael's university, the teacher argues from a legal perspective that even though there is such thing as a morality based on right-and-wrong, society does not judge its behaviour on this, but rather what is legally sound. Therefore, if an argument supporting the extermination of sections of society is popular and convincing enough, then legally there is nothing wrong with this. In a later scene, an angry student counter-argues with the typical emotional response, summarising that the law can be wrong, and even dangerous. The teacher agrees, and yet urges Michael to take his knowledge of Hanna's secret to the court on the grounds of it being evidence and warning him not to allow his anger to condemn her to an unfair sentence. Michael refuses to take this advice, effectively allowing Hanna to suffer the rest of her life in prison. The issue is thus scaled down and subverted, forcing members of the audience to question not only their opinions of German guilt but also consider the extent of their humanity to those who showed none themselves. As far as I was concerned, my sympathy lay with both the victims of the holocaust and with those like Hanna, so easily duped into what is now generally regarded as such an ugly movement.Unsurprisingly, Winslet is excellent, and undoubtedly deserved her Academy Award for her performance; though not her best performance, Winslet has certainly now established herself as a member of a very special club, and not a moment too soon. Special mention should also go out to German actor David Kross who managed to effortlessly portray the progession from 15-year-old Michael's naïvety to his more worldly anguish as a 22-year-old law student. Though Feinnes was equally good, his role in the film felt minimal in comparison, which was a shame, since his performance was elegantly nuanced, quietly delivering his lines with strong overtones of a man who finally understood what his teacher at university meant about the changing tides of legal morality.My only real problem with the performances lies with what was very likely to have been a decision made by director Stephen Frears (of Billy Elliott fame). Why oh why, in an English-speaking film, did the characters speak with German accents? Such blatant signposting felt unnecessary and jarring, serving only to undermine the otherwise very good directorial influence, and cheapened the overall feel of the film, at times making it seem more like a feature-length episode of 'Allo 'Allo. This didn't go unnoticed by my Spanish friends who watched the film with me, and complained about their difficulty with understanding the dialogue without the subtitles.Nevertheless, The Reader is a good, solid two hours of intelligent entertainment, worth watching, if you're into that sort of thing.
Four Stars.
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