Susan Granger’s review of “The Reader” (Weinstein Company)
Unlike most Holocaust literature, Bernhard Schlink’s acclaimed 1995 novel places a perpetrator, not a victim, at the heart of the story, which examines the effort of the ‘next generation’ to come to terms with Germany’s war guilt. Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is a lonely, alienated lawyer who recalls how – in post-W.W.II Germany – as a 15 year-old (David Kross), he became infatuated with Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a woman twice his age. Furtively, they conducted an intense, sexually-charged, clandestine affair. Although she adored his reading aloud to her, one day Hanna, inexplicably, vanished. Flash forward to 1966, when Michael was a law student attending Nazi war criminal trials where he discovers that his beloved Hanna was formerly a SS concentration-camp guard and is charged with the murder of hundreds of Jewish women whom she left locked in a fiery church. Stunned, Michael realizes that he, alone, possesses irrefutable evidence – Hanna’s shameful secret – that would have a profound effect on her conviction and sentence for this atrocity. Yet this callow youth chooses to remain silent. Then, 20 years later, Hanna’s and Michael’s lives, once again, intersect. One of the most emotionally effective scenes occurs near the conclusion when Michael travels to Manhattan to visit a wealthy writer (Lena Olin) whose mother survived the conflagration in which Hanna unapologetically took part and testified against her at the trial. Despite the literate, well-intentioned efforts of screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry, the inner workings of Winslet’s damaged character are never revealed and that, in turn, keeps the audience at an emotional distance. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Reader” is an unevenly paced yet morally complex 8, dredging the depths of a legacy of responsibility and culpability.
