The Reader

I saw The Reader last night and was sadly, unimpressed. Maybe it’s my Cassavetes obsession or my love for the kind of adhoc aesthetic of the Maysles brothers, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the Hollywood conventional-ness of it all.

Adapted from Bernard Schlink’s excellent novel, the story follows a teenage boy’s sexual awakening and subsequent discovery of his older lover’s Nazi past. Michael (David Kross) meets Hanna (Kate Winslet) when he throws up outside her house one afternoon. She takes him home (he has scarlet fever) and once he is better the two embark on an affair.  Hanna likes being read to, and the two spend a lovely summer of books and sex, after which Hanna disappears. After the affair, Michael goes around steeped in a Goethe-like melancholy. As the adult Michael Ralph Fiennes does a sterling job of this – he even somehow looks German, a trick which Kate Winslet never manages, despite her floral dresses and sturdy sandals. Years later, Michael attends the trial of some Nazi guards as part of his University studies. Hanna is one of the women being tried, and despite the fact it could affect the outcome of her sentence, she refuses to reveal her illiteracy. She is found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. After some years, Michael begins to send her tapes of the books he read to her the summer of the affair, and slowly, she learns to read.

Schlink’s book is full of powerful imagery, and considering Germany’s rich cinematic history it seems almost wasteful to have the film made by an Englishman whose contributions (despite his repeated Oscar nominations) to cinema have been solid at best. ‘Solid’ is a good way to describe The Reader. Shot with pleasant lighting, a blue-grey colour palette, bland mise-en-scene, and driven along by a manipulative syrup of a score, the fact that it is a ‘good’ movie is perhaps its worst flaw. I was simply underwhelmed by the blandness of it all. Wim Wenders writes that there are films that open your eyes and films that gummy them up, noting that the best films make you think differently, while the rest reinforce a kind of status quo.

The Reader is one of the latter, when it ought to be one of the former. Schlink’s story explores the moral and emotional ambiguities of post Nazi Germany, but the film never really gives us a good idea of the climate in which it’s set. The characters ask, ‘Given the circumstances of our lives, how do we best live?’ Questions of complicity, guilt, shame and responsibility are twisted together like a Celtic love-knot, but the film waters all this turgid emotion into one and a half hours of flaccid drivel. It plays to the audience in the crudest cinematic way, and while it works on this level – the two lovely women on either side of me were in tears – I’d forgotten it by the time I got home.