Click to play videoCast: Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes
Direction: Stephen Daldry
In The Reader, Kate Winslet stars as Hanna Schmitz, a dour thirty-something tram conductor in 1950s West Germany, who indulges in a passionate sexual relationship with a fifteen-year-old boy Michael, played by David Kross. They spend afternoons making love in her flat, but before each amorous session she encourages him to read aloud to her from the classics – Chekhov, Homer, Tolstoy.
Hanna vanishes mysteriously one day, but many years later Michael sees her again, this time in court, being tried as a criminal. Hanna, he learns, was an SS camp guard at Auschwitz where she is accused of having committed mass murder along with five other female guards.
A powerful film about complex themes such as guilt and shame, The Reader goes into dark, disturbing directions as it explores Michael's feelings on learning the truth about Hanna. Even when he's older and played by Ralph Fiennes, we see Michael haunted by his past, grappling with the repercussions of his relationship with Hanna – he possibly feels violated, he blames his infatuation with her for the subsequent stunting of his own emotional growth, and yet at the same time there is a deep sense of pity he feels for her. There is also the issue of guilt because of the Holocaust, and we see Michael wrestling with his conscience over that guilt.
The film's moral hook lies in a discovery that Michael makes about Hanna quite late in the day; it is a vital piece of information that if he decides to share with the court, might help Hanna's case to some extent.
Morally complex and erotically charged, The Reader is on the one level a film about the impact of German guilt on the generation born after the Holocaust, but on another level it's also a surprisingly warm love-story between this unlikely pair.
It's difficult to feel sympathy for a character like Hanna Schmitz whose back-story and real identity is repulsive to say the least, but Kate Winslet humanizes her to such an extent that you can relate to her even if you can't sympathise with her. And it couldn't possibly have been an easy character to play: she goes from a seductress, to an uncomprehending war criminal, to an elderly convict, and she is totally convincing throughout.
The bravura of Winslet's performance lies in the fact that she doesn't stop at anything in her efforts to create a believable character out of Hanna, even if that means shedding her clothes for those intimate scenes with her young lover.
Winslet is remarkable as Hanna Schmitz, and even though I believe her performance in Revolutionary Road was the bigger breakthrough, the Oscar is entirely deserved.
A mention here also for David Kross who convincingly plays Hanna's teenage lover; Kross perfectly captures the pain and horror of a young boy who's just discovered that the woman he can't get out of his head was once a monster.
Directed thoughtfully by Stephen Daldry, The Reader is packed with delicate twists. I'll go with three out of five for The Reader, it's an absorbing film made only better by Winslet's winning performance.
Rating: 3 / 5 (Good)
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