The Reader

A thoughtful, moving examination of the Holocaust and how successive generations have tried to come to terms with it. The film begins in Neustadt in 1958, where a fifteen year-old boy, Michael (David Kross), begins an illicit affair with an older woman, Hanna (Kate Winslet), who works on the trams. For Michael, this is a sexual awakening, but for Hanna it is something different. Before sex she asks Michael to read aloud to her - Homer, Lawrence, Hergé - but just a few months after meeting him, Hanna disappears.

Michael doesn't come across her again until 1966, whilst he is studying at university. There he discovers that Hanna worked as a guard at Auschwitz and stands accused, alongside several other women, of allowing 300 Jewish women to die in a fire during the death march that followed Auschwitz's evacuation. What follows is an analysis of national guilt and of the difference between thought and feeling. Michael holds a key piece of evidence that could help Hanna in her trial but should he present it to the courts? As Hanna is singled out by her fellow guards as the one who was in control, David Hare's intelligent screenplay infers that it is not just Hanna that is guilty. One angry student rails against his professor (Bruno Ganz, previously so effective as Hitler in Downfall) for "letting it happen", whilst Michael ponders the ramifications of a successful conviction so that successive generations won't forget what has happened.

A fair amount of criticism has been levelled at the film for what is perceived to be a certain amount of sympathy for Hanna. This, I think, misses the point. Hanna is singled out not as a victim but as something tangible for the second generation to pin their blame to. It's tempting to say that Hanna represents Germany's national guilt but this isn't really true either. She is representative of a need by the second generation to intellectualise and understand something so heinous that any explanation, in the end, remains elusive. As the film enters its final stretch, detailing Hanna's interment in prison, we see her movement from somebody who is able "not to think" about the crimes she has committed to someone who is able to feel them. It is at this point that the character becomes completely unknowable, slipping out of the fiction altogether.

The film's final scene involves Michael traveling to America to meet with a camp survivor Ilana Mather (Lena Olin), offering her money that Hanna left in to her in her will. Ilana refuses the money and, one must feel rightly, refuses the request for absolution. There is, she explains, no meaning when it comes to the camps; there is nothing there.

Of course, the movie isn't without its flaws. The fact that the entire film is in English (apparently at the request of the novel's author Bernard Schlick) with the actors speaking in German accents feels unnecessary but it's to be expected of prestige dramas with Oscar possibilities. Accusations of sentimentality wouldn't be entirely unjust either, but these are minor quibbles when taken as a whole the movie is so rich and interesting. As one would expect, both Winslet and Ralph Fiennes (as the older Michael) are very strong indeed (although the former's performance in Revolutionary Road is better, at least to my mind) but David Kross is the real standout. At eighteen, he's required to take on a great deal of the film's weight and he copes remarkably well. It's a pity he wasn't up for Best Supporting Actor, as this is a much more complex role than that of Michael Shannon's in Revolutionary Road, which everyone raved about.

This won't be to everyone's tastes, but it's a provocative movie that raised very conflicted feelings for this viewer and, as such, it should be applauded.