If you know absolutely nothing about "The Reader" then you should keep yourself in the dark and see it as soon as possible. But if you have read reviews or are aware of its plot then I hope to dispel some of the very negative things people are saying about it. One criticism that keeps coming up concerns its basic subject matter, the Holocaust. Critics argue that the filmmakers are exploiting the topic in order to win awards. I have claimed to understand filmmakers' intentions before, but here it is just mean-spirited, unfair, and unnecessary. We should assume that the people behind this movie set out to make a good film, and that is all.
The Holocaust does figure prominently, but "The Reader" is also a personal story about the emotional isolation that can occur when one needlessly keeps a personal weakness, flaw, or shame hidden. Most of the time this secret isn't very shameful at all compared to what one does in order to keep it.
Ralph Fiennes plays Michael Berg, a German lawyer in 1995. He is cold, distant, obviously damaged. His relationships with women appear to be limited to one-night stands; in the opening scene he is awkwardly making breakfast for a lover. Later in the day, we learn, he will see his daughter.
As Michael stares out his window, the image of a train rushing by transports him back to 1958, when he was 15. It is on a train that young Michael (David Kross) first realizes he is ill. He throws up near the entrance to an apartment building, and a woman named Hanna (Kate Winslet) cleans him up and walks him home.
He spends months in bed with scarlet fever, without much more than a stamp collection to keep him company. As soon as he feels well enough he visits Hanna to thank her. After Michael gets dirty shoveling coal in the basement of her apartment, she convinces him to take a bath. The next thing we know, she's naked as well.
An affair begins between them. Hanna is always deadly serious, taciturn. At first it just seems to be about sex, but soon Hanna requests that Michael read to her, and it becomes their pre-intercourse ritual. They read everything, from Odysseus to Tintin comic books. Soon we become aware that she is illiterate. She tells him he's very good at reading aloud. "I never thought I was good at anything," he says.
David Kross skillfully portrays young Michael as a sensitive, sincere teenager. Kate Winslett won an Academy Award for her performance, deservedly so. One moment with Kate that stood out for me occurs when Michael asks her if she loves him and she says "yes." There is a monumental strain, an exhaustion, in her delivery, with a trembling intensity percolating below it. You know she loves him because she says it like it's the last thing she ever wanted.
Though the two love each other, Hanna is taking advantage of Michael. There is something disconcerting about the way she carries herself, like there is a fragile core to her being that may shatter with a sudden gesture. One senses immediately that Hanna is a social outcast, or is at least living in a sort of self-imposed exile. A lonely young boy yearning for affection could fall for her - I think anyone a bit older would instinctively feel that something is wrong. When you're young and don't think that you're good at anything, you usually acquire a deep affection for the first people who make you feel like you are.
One day, however, Hanna leaves without notice. Years later Michael is attending law school. His professor (Bruno Ganz) takes his seminar to a trial in which four women are being prosecuted for their roles as SS concentration camp guards. Michael is sickened to see that Hanna is one of these women.
I asked you to stop reading earlier because I believe it is best to go into this movie with absolutely no knowledge of the plot. I have read what I am about to say in other reviews, but I would just like to preface it with the note that this plot point is one of the things I loved discovering for myself while watching the movie.
Anyway, things take a strange and surprising turn when it is revealed that Hanna is completely remorseless. As the trial develops it becomes clear, only to us and Michael, that Hanna actually believes her illiteracy is more shameful than the atrocities she committed during the war. She is chillingly, foolishly honest and matter-of-fact about her actions during wartime. As for her illiteracy, Hanna is determined never to reveal it. She makes choices in order to hide her illiteracy are bewildering, infuriating.
In her review for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes, "You have to wonder who, exactly, wants or needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death camp guard." That appraisal of the film is distorted and cynical. The implication here is that Dargis is morally superior to the film, filmmakers, or any audience member that happens to pity Hanna. The fallacy in her implication, I think, is that she equates pity with absolution. When we pity we do not always forgive - in some cases we may pity people who have committed the unforgivable because, morally and emotionally, they are completely lost. It should also be noted that the voices of Holocaust survivors are represented prominently in the film, particularly by a woman who was a young girl under Hanna's watch (Lena Olin). The movie asks us to pity every German who was alive during World War II, the victims of the Holocaust most of all.
The intent of the film is obliquely debated, actually, by the students in the seminar. One student asks why they are even bothering to watch the trial. The women, he suggests, should just kill themselves. Michael's reply is that they are watching it "to understand."
What seems to haunt Ralph Fiennes' Michael is the fact that he cannot understand Hanna. This person whom he believed he knew intimately, whom he has loved more than anyone else, suffers from an outrageous moral lapse, absurdly considering her illiteracy more shameful than the Holocaust. The movie does not use Hanna's illiteracy as an excuse for her actions, as Manohla Dargis suggests in her review - only Hanna does that. Her illiteracy, rather, is the source of Michael's, and our, indignation.
In turn, Hanna becomes Michael's secret shame. Michael's wounds have distanced him from his former wife, his daughter, and any other person he may have come across in the last thirty years. There is a scene midway through the film between Michael and his daughter where they discuss his coldness, apparently for the first time. The emotion in the scene blindsided me. Pitch perfect, it sets the tone for the rest of the film and gives us the requisite information we need to follow Michael as an empathetic character.
Though I will not describe how, Hanna's path to complicity in the Holocaust is directly marked by her illiteracy. However, there is also a more indirect, insidious way in which her illiteracy made her complicit in the Holocaust. When you irrationally keep a secret, a secret shame that isn't very shameful at all, that anyone could empathize with, then you gradually stop thinking of people as people. You suspect the worst in them; that they would never want to understand you. You end up dehumanizing them and isolating yourself.
It should go without saying, but terrible things can happen when you don't allow people their humanity.
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