Movie review: The Reader

by Alex Bentley

Even with a subject as heinous as Nazis and the Holocaust, one would think there would have to be a limit to how many movies could be made on the topic. And that would go double for fiction movies, since there are more than enough real-life stories to be told as it is (including another one, Valkyrie, which was just released).

And yet here comes The Reader, which stars Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz, a former Nazi prison camp guard who goes on trial for her crimes. Actually, The Reader, based on the 1995 book of the same name, is only tangentially about the trial, a plot choice that could have been to its benefit but ends up being a detriment.

Most of the film deals with the relationship between Hanna and Michael Berg (played as a teenager by German actor David Kross, then Ralph Fiennes as an adult). Their bond starts in the mid-'50s when Michael is just 16 and Hanna is working as a ticket taker on a trolley. Their affair has a somewhat strange start, made even stranger by Hanna's odd request that Michael read to her before any lovemaking session.

Soon, though, Hanna disappears and Michael goes on with his life. The film takes several significant jumps in time, first to Michael's college years, when, as a law student, he just so happens to take a class that takes a field trip to the trial of six female Nazi prison camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. Throughout the trial and for the rest of the film, Michael is sent into a spiral of emotions, trying to reconcile the fact that he had a not-so-innocent affair with a woman who just so happened to have committed horrendous crimes.

Much of the ultimate failure of The Reader hinges on the lack of any real emotion put in the relationship of Hanna and Michael. Oh, sure, it's easy to see how Michael becomes so infatuated with Hanna, but her motivations are a complete mystery, starting with why she chooses to sleep with him to begin with. She doesn't seem all that enthused, seemingly only doing so because he happened to be there. Their later interactions would be much more interesting if the feelings they show had any connection with their past lives.

Then there's the idea of just dropping the idea that Hanna used to be a Nazi prison camp guard into the film halfway through. This kind of “surprise” (at least it would be had it not been prominently featured in the trailer) might work in book form, but in a film it feels kind of cheap and exploitative. There's not the slightest indication beforehand that Hanna is hiding any kind of secret, much less one this big, so the soul-searching on both her and Michael's parts in the latter half of the film doesn't quite ring true.

Despite all this, Winslet does her best to elevate the proceedings. The five-time Academy Award-nominated actress is usually the best thing in any film she's in, and this is no exception (she's already up for a Golden Globe for this role and will likely earn yet another Oscar nomination). The misgivings about her character somehow don't carry over to her performance, which is one of the film's few saving graces.

The Reader feels like one of those films that wants to be important, but doesn't quite have the ability to pull it off. The moral ambiguity of the actions of the characters should hit like a ton of bricks, but instead barely makes an impact at all.