Fiennes is solid as the elder Berg, but by this stage of life the “oldness” Hanna once exhibited has caught up with him too, making his a somewhat listless role. Lena Olin as a unyielding camp survivor and Bruno Ganz as a sagacious law professor put in memorable appearances. To Winslet and Kross belong the gutsy, intense performances of the film. Did he never question his father - depicted here as a stern, unsympathetic man - about what he did during the war? What remains unclear, in the film at least, is why Michael has seemingly never thought about any of this before 1966. They muddy the waters and complicate the emotions, but the facts of her actions smother any possible empathy. Neither Hare nor Daldry shows us any easy way to look at this character. But there is neither an excuse nor an offer of atonement ready for her. There is an explanation, not immediately apparent, for why Hanna found herself in a position to dictate life or death. The film makes no attempt to answer this question if indeed there is an answer. But how does one deal with a monster who is a lover? One can only condemn her but in that condemnation, where lies the process of understanding? Michael is shaken to his core by growing evidence that his first love is, by any standard, a monster. Eight years later, as Michael attends a war crimes trial as a law student in Heidelberg, she makes a startling reappearance as a defendant. Yet there is a kind of role reversal in his reading to her that allows him to expose her to worlds she never knew. She calls him “Kid” and clearly an “oldness” afflicts her beyond her years. They embark on an affair with its own kind of feverish urgency.Īs part of their bedroom rituals, he starts to read to her from books by Mark Twain, Homer and Anton Chekhov. Upon recovering, he looks her up to thank her and is startled to find himself losing his virginity to her. Coming down with what he later learns is scarlet fever, he is helped home by a stranger, Hanna (Winslet). We’re swiftly conveyed back to 1958, when his younger self (very well played by David Kross) has a chance encounter that will forever affect him. The film opens in 1995 Berlin, where Ralph Fiennes plays aloof, emotionally numb attorney Michael Berg. But since we first meet her in an entirely different light, as a kind, loving and passionate woman, it explores the challenges of this second generation in navigating a welter of deeply psychological and morally complex issues. The Reader, based on Bernhard Schlink’s controversial German novel, deliberately places a Holocaust perpetrator at the story’s focal point. 10, expands Christmas Day and goes national Jan. But German postwar guilt is not the most winning subject matter for the holiday season. The lively, nonlinear structure imposed by screenwriter David Hare and tight, focused direction from Stephen Daldry make this an engaging period drama. Certainly The Reader, for all its erotic scenes involving Kate Winslet, presents a difficult marketing challenge.
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