 |
|
|
the READER
(**)
|
|
|
Movie Review by:
Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
|
Directed by:
Stephen Daldry |
Written by:
David Hare, adapted from the book of the same name by Bernhard Schlink |
Starring:
Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Karoline Herfurth, |
Running time:
122 minutes
|
Released:
12/12/08
|
|
Rated R
for some scenes of
sexuality and nudity. |
|
|
"...a film that features an admittedly extraordinary performance from Kate
Winslet surrounded by a lot of other stuff that doesn’t work nearly as well as
it should have."
|
|
|
There are two ways to approach “The Reader,” the
big-screen adaptation of the internationally acclaimed 1995 novel by German
author Bernhard Schlink. The first is to look at it as a high-toned work of
artistically inclined cinema that serves as a meditation on the nature of truth,
guilt, reconciliation and redemption while saying profound things about literacy
(it is for it) and the Holocaust (it is against it). On the other hand, once can
also look at it as a strange coming-of-age story about a teenage boy who finds
himself embroiled in a passionate and life-changing affair with an older woman
who turns out to have a couple of big secrets hidden up the sleeves that she is
rarely seen wearing. I have no doubt that the filmmakers would prefer that I
look at it as the former but the problem with doing that is that it really
doesn’t work along those lines. On the other hand, it doesn’t really work as an
example of the latter either when you get right down to it. No matter how you
approach it, the end result is the same--a film that features an admittedly
extraordinary performance from Kate Winslet surrounded by a lot of other stuff
that doesn’t work nearly as well as it should have.
After kicking things off with a framing device set in 1995 that suggests how
grim and dour things are eventually going to get, mostly because of the presence
of an extra-dour Ralph Fiennes, “The Reader” begins in Germany in 1958 with
15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) staggering through the streets in the
rain before virtually collapsing in the courtyard of an apartment building.
There, he is rescued by Hannah (Kate Winslet), an older bus conductor who cleans
him up and takes him back to his home, where he spends the next few months
battling what turns out to be scarlet fever. When he recovers, he returns to her
apartment to thank her for helping him out and while he is there, one thing
leads to another and she winds up giving him both a bath and a roll in the hay.
This begins a passionate and clandestine affair that eventually expands into new
areas when Hannah insists that he read to her for a while before they hit the
sheets and they begin plowing through the great works of literature, including
“Huckleberry Finn,” “The Odyssey” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (the last one
being a neat trick since it wasn’t widely available to the general public at the
time). At first, Michael is so besotted with Hannah that he hardly even
registers her occasional coldness towards him (“You don’t matter enough to upset
me.”) and even begins envisioning some kind of idyllic future for them--they
even spend a weekend in the country together where the local innkeeper wishes
him and his mother well. Eventually, however, Michael begins spending more time
with friends his own age and one day, Hannah leaves town without warning, a
shocking move that will affect all of his future romantic relationships.
The story picks up eight years later with Michael in law school. As part of his
class work, he and his fellow students are attending a high-profile war crimes
trial involving a group of middle-aged women who were in charge of a prison camp
who allowed a group of prisoners that they were escorting through the
countryside after an evacuation to burn to death inside of the firebombed church
that they were locked inside rather than run the risk of them escaping--an
incident that only came to light later on when one of the few survivors escaped
to America and wrote a book about her experiences before returning to Germany to
testify against her former captors. However, Michael is stunned to discover that
one of the defendants is none other than Hannah herself and not only that, she
seems perfectly willing to simply assume all the blame instead of offering up
any real defense. As it turns out, she is doing this in order to mask an even
more terrible and shocking secret (well, from her perspective, of course)--that
she is completely illiterate but by the time Michael puts it all together, she
has been sentenced to life in prison. A decade later, Michael decides to
confront his still-potent feelings for Hannah by sending her packages that
contain tapes of him reading books to her. Over the next decade, Hannah finally
learns to read thanks to these tapes and when it comes time for her parole in
1988, he is the only contact that the prison can find for her and for the first
time since that long-ago summer, the two are reunited and are forced to come to
terms with both their shared past and uncertain futures.
The early scenes of “The Reader,” the ones chronicling the torrid affair between
Hannah and Michael, are by far the best in the film and this is not, as some
might suggest, because of the amount of skin bared by Kate Winslet during them.
Rather, it is because Winslet and Kross are able to create a convincing
relationship in these scenes that is reasonably intriguing, assuming that you
are able to overlook the fact that you can pretty much put together Hannah’s
shocking non-Nazi secret without much trouble and that you can overlook the fact
that this kind of tale might not go down so well if the genders of the two
characters had been reversed. However, once this portion of the story concludes
and the film moves on to the stuff involving the trial and its aftermath, it
becomes clear that while director Stephen Daldry (whose previous film was the
equally mediocre award-grubber “The Hours”) and screenwriter David Hare are
fully aware that they are telling a story of truth, guilt and the attempts of
the German people, both as individuals and as a country, to reconcile themselves
with their past and redeeming themselves for their past misdeeds, they don’t
really have anything of interest or value to say about these subjects.
Oh sure, they assume the proper high moral tone required of a movie of this type
and as a result, it may fool some viewers into thinking that because it deals
with important subjects, the film itself is somehow important by extension. In
fact, the movie itself is just as intellectually bankrupt as its anti-heroine
and its suggestion that Hannah’s actions can be understood and almost excused by
the fact that she never learned to read is borderline offensive. Additionally,
it never quite manages to explain why Michael is so crushed with guilt over his
relationship with Hannah when it is made explicit that she refuses to offer him
any details into her own past. I suppose that this is an aspect to the story
that might have gotten lost in the translation somewhere along the way but
without it, it leaves a big hole at the center of the story that winds up
subverting its grand stabs at catharsis in the final scenes as Michael finally
deals with his relationship with Hannah in order to absolve himself of her sins
and to get on with his life.
Although Kross acquits himself well as the younger version of Michael and there
is a nice late-inning turn from Lena Olin as the daughter of the survivor of
that church firebombing (who has a withering scene at the end that almost serves
as a meta-critique of the very film that we have just been watching), the only
aspect of “The Reader” that really works--the thing that saves it from
essentially being “Summer of 42” with swastikas--is the central performance (not
supporting, despite what the awards committee at the Weinstein Company would
have you and Academy voters believe otherwise) from Kate Winslet as Hannah.
Granted, the notion of Winslet turning in a superlative performance is hardly
anything new--a very good case could be made for her as the single best actress
working in films today--but in most of her other triumphs, she was helped out by
working on projects that offered her fully developed characters and screenplays
to work from. Here, she has taken the barely coherent scraps offered her--if you
stop to think about the character of Hannah for more than a few minutes, the
utter absurdity of the role only becomes more and more evident--and somehow
forges them into a performance that is both real and viable despite the fact
that you can’t really shake the feeling that her work here is more about getting
her a long-overdue Oscar (after five nominations) than anything else. Even so,
as blatant award-baiting performances go, this one is as good as they get and
when she is on the screen, her fierce and deeply committed performance is almost
enough to make you forget just how silly the rest of “The Reader” really is. |
|
|
|
the READER © 2009 The Weinstein
Company
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2009 Alternate Reality, Inc.
|
|
|
|
OTHER
REVIEWS... |
|
RASSLIN' REVIEW |
|
 |
|
Pay Per
Views and House Shows, we layeth the Smaketh- Down on
both! |
|
|
|
KIDS REVIEWS |
|
 |
|
Dozen's of kid
friendly titles arrive every week and we review the one that
stands out. |
|
|
|
AT THE MOVIES |
|
 |
|
Every week we
give you our opinion on what's playing at the cinema. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
