The Reader
Kate Winslet once appeared in Ricky Gervais’ satirical TV series Extras playing a cynical, opportunistic version of herself. In it, she had deliberately taken a role in a Holocaust drama because she thought it automatically meant an Oscar win. Therefore it is not without irony that she has just won an Oscar for a role in a Holocaust drama, The Reader. Said role is good, but frankly far from Winslet at her best, and although hers is the kind of epic, showy performance Oscar voters love, I was massively disappointed that Angelina Jolie didn’t win instead for her extraordinary and vastly superior turn in Changeling.
With Winslet’s hilarious role in Extras forever lodged in my mind, I found it impossible to approach The Reader without a degree of cynicism. Based on Bernhard Schlink’s novel, the plot concerns an affair between 15-year old German schoolboy Michael Berg and tram ticket collector Hannah, in 1958 Berlin. This brief, summer romance so traumatises the impressionable Michael that it has profound effects on the rest of his life; effects that take a dark turn when it is later revealed that Hannah was an SS guard in Nazi death camps and is placed on trial for war crimes.
My father once described the first act of the otherwise rather good 1986 thriller No Way Out as “one long fornication” and that also more or less sums up the initial scenes in The Reader. However, once the all too familiar (and arguably pornographic) youthful rites of passage are dispensed with, there are some intermittently powerful sequences – Michael’s visit to the death camps, the reason why Hannah loves to be read to, and a brilliant penultimate scene featuring a Holocaust survivor in Michael’s older years that made far more of an impression that anything Kate Winslet was responsible for.
Director Stephen Daldry, who made the excellent Billy Elliot, directs with quiet, sombre restraint which suits the subject matter. However it’s a shame that as a film The Reader is such an infuriately mixed bag. Obviously it is very serious, but David Hare’s screenplay doesn’t generate a sufficient head of dramatic tension, and feels overlong. Whether that’s the result of being too faithful to the book or departing from it I can’t say, as I haven’t read it, but this is nowhere near the same league as – say – The Pianist, Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful or even last years immensely powerful if improbable The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
Thankfully, the actors go a long way to make up for such shortcomings. David Kross is particularly good as the vulnerable young Michael. Repressed, guilt-ridden and scarred by his infatuation with Hannah, he then cannot interact properly with girls his own age, and subsequently fails at marriage later in life. As the older version of Michael, the always brilliant Ralph Fiennes contributes another superb performance. And to be fair to Kate Winslet, she does do very well in the difficult role of Hannah. I just don’t think she should have won an Oscar for it.
Still, there can never be too many films about the Holocaust. The Reader is a deeply flawed but nevertheless interesting study of guilt, obsession and repressed emotion. Some Christians will no doubt take it to task for excessive sex and nudity, but taken as a whole this is a bleak but moral tale, especially considering how Michael’s youthful passions ultimately destroy his entire life.
Simon Dillon, February 2009.
