Review: The Reader

The Reader is full of cracking performances from its star-filled cast, its plot – complete with twist – raises questions about morality and the law, and the direction is assured, but there’s some magic ingredient missing somewhere.

Ralph Fiennes is Michael Berg, a German lawyer; being played by the king of the stiff upper lip – any emotion tightly reined in – clearly indicates he must have been scarred in the past to make him the way he is. The film charts his encounter, at the age of 15, with Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) in the late 50s.

Setting aside any qualms the audience might have of a 30-something woman to all intents and purposes seducing a 15-year old boy and any questions of credibility (it’s easy to see what he sees in her, but what on earth does she see in him?), Berg and Schmitz are fleshed out well by David Kross and Winslet, building audience empathy, but we know it can’t last. In between the sex, she asks him to read her to her – and essentially that’s their relationship: sex and him reading aloud to her.

Inevitably she leaves him (although the reasons are not entirely clear) and the city. A decade later, as a law student, Berg finally sees her again – in court, on trial for war crimes, accused of being an SS guard who death-marched 300 women out of Auschwitz.

Berg must wrestle with his feelings for her, the resentment he still carries, and, as the case heads towards its conclusion, the knowledge that he can save her. But does he want to save her? Does she deserve saving? If he withholds what he knows, does it matter that she’ll be punished for the wrong reasons?

30 years later he still wrestles with the same questions and sets out to find some catharsis.

Ultimately, Bernhard Schlink’s book, on which David Hare based this adaptation, is clearly concerned with Germany’s national guilt over the horrors of WWII. Apparently, director Stephen Daldry and his producers the late Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella were concerned that the universal themes of the novel not be confined to the time and place of the book’s setting – and they decided the only way to resolve this was to go with an English-speaking cast.

And that’s a mistake, I feel. It’s the same as if Scorsese had made Schindler’s List: it wasn’t his movie to make. This is a story about Germany’s past – and it should have been made by a German. Indeed two of the cream of the crop of German acting talent (Bruno Ganz and Alexandria Maria Lara) are in the movie, playing telling supporting roles, lending authenticity.

Everything about the movie is of the very highest quality and there are many outstanding scenes – Fiennes, as ever, suffers exquisitely and slightly perversely he commands the two or three most emotional scenes in the movie – and yet, like I said at the start, there’s something missing.
Score: 7.5/10