Book Worm

Stephen Daldry's The Reader

by Shaun Brady

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In post-WWII Germany, young Michael Berg embarks on a passionate affair with an older woman, dashing to her apartment every day after school, both of them out of their clothes as soon as he steps in the door. In between the lovemaking, she has him read to her. So, how does Berg grow from the wide-eyed, vigorous boy played by David Kross into the grey, dour man portrayed by Ralph Fiennes?

The answer lies in the secrets gradually revealed about his lover, Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet with the guarded vulnerability of a wounded animal. Years after their summer fling, Berg sees her again in an unexpected place, when law professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz) takes his class to the war-crimes trial of a group of female concentration camp guards. Schmitz chooses to take the lion's share of the blame in order to cover up another secret. Fiennes' grim perma-pout is the result of his own guilt during the years of her imprisonment.

In the hands of director Stephen Daldry, Bernhard Schlink's slim, unsentimental novel swells with self-important melodrama. As with The Hours, he adapts his source like a novice book-club reader horrified at the prospect of criticizing a single period in a proclaimed classic. The material is smothered with respect, nearly drained of life by the orange glow of its oh-so-tasteful cinematography.

To his credit, Daldry confronts the dilemmas of post-Holocaust Germany with ambiguity intact, questioning how a country can re-engage with the world after having atrocities committed in its name, and on a more personal level, searching for a reaction when someone we love turns out to be capable of monstrous acts. But in the film these become philosophy class exercises, conundrums posed not to plumb the soul but to make a self-satisfied audience pleased with themselves for having dealt with them, then moves on to the more important work of Oscar-friendly weepiness.

For all of the important questions it may raise, what sticks in the mind is not the movie's self-flagellating second half, but the sexual escapades of its first. Winslet refuses to succumb to the film's gauzy sentimentality, imbuing Hanna with a strength cracking under the strain of guilt and doubt. In an almost constant state of undress, she seems to be willing herself to a state of self-delusion, trying to convince herself to move past what she's been responsible for. While the film may culminate in a finger-wagging lecture to Fiennes by camp survivor Lena Olin, it's in the contradictory urges on Winslet's face that we see the messy reality of human nature.

The Reader | Directed by Stephen Daldry | A Weinstein Company release