Complicated Reader an Uncompromising Success
In 1958, 15-year-old German Michael Berg (David Kross) makes the acquaintance of the beautiful Hanna (Kate Winslet) while on his way home in the rain. One thing leads to another, and soon he’s having a torrid affair with the stern, sexy older woman, the two spending many long hours together whiling away the time in her rundown studio apartment.
Kate Winslet and David Kross in The Weinstein Company's The Reader
Almost without warning, one day Hanna up and disappears, a distraught Michael unable to understand what has become of his beautiful lover he had so recently spent so much time laying beside reading great works of literature to. Eight years later, while in law school, he is surprised to see her again on trial for murder, the size of what it is she is being accused of knocking him for a loop.
After two-plus decades, Michael (Ralph Fiennes) receives a call from a women’s correctional facility inquiring to his relationship with Hanna. Even though he hasn’t spoken to her since his sixteenth birthday, he’s still kept in at least some small form of communication, sending the inmate recording of novels he's read for her on a semi-regular basis.
But has she learned anything during her incarceration? Has Hanna come to grips with the enormity of her crimes? And, even if she has, does that simple fact make her worthy of anything even close to resembling forgiveness?
There is nothing easy about director Stephen Daldry’s (The Hours) The Reader. This adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel by noted playwright David Hare (Plenty, Damage) has many twists and turns, asking its audience to ponder numerous moral complexities in ways that can be distinctly uncomforting. It is a movie that can offend just as much as it exhilarates, the discussions it generates on both sides of the divide sure to be ones intelligent filmgoers would be all the better off for entering.
To be perfectly frank, when I came out of the theater I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I exactly thought of this one. It moves from pubescent coming of age pictoral into a saga of nationalistic guilt almost on a dime, the price of personal obligation, duty and regret hovering over every frame like a hammer just waiting for the signal to fall.
This tends to make things highly uncomfortable, the disconcerting nature of the overlapping narrative overpowering the central dramatics at the core. It doesn’t especially help that the central mystery isn’t even close to being a surprise, Hanna’s linguistic inadequacies almost as forgone as her naive confusion as to why her time serving her country in WWII has suddenly caused such a fuss.
The thing is, Daldry absolutely refuses to wallop the viewer over the head with any of this. Michael’s story is a complicated one, his sexual awakening at the hands of a one-time champion of the Third Reich not exactly something he could have known about. When the truth is out in the open what is it this young man should now think? Is hatred an option? Is allowing her absolution possible? There really isn’t any way for him to know, only the passage of time and the complexities of adulthood allowing him to somewhat understand what any of this history might actually mean.
There are some flaws that have nothing to do with the picture’s intense and knotty subject matter. Daldry was forced to rush production by producer Harvey Weinstein and, at times, this intensified schedule shows in the finished project. Some of the dramatic transitions aren’t as tightly focused as I felt they probably should be, the lack of a clearly cohesive center making it sometimes difficult to ascertain the who’s, what’s and why’s behind some of the characters’ motivations.
What does end up working is the stunning photography by the great Roger Deakins (Doubt) and the almost legendary Chris Menges (Stop-Loss), the latter coming onto the feature after the schedule was changed by the producer and the former suddenly had conflicts with other projects. Yet the two manage to find some form of miraculous cohesion in their shooting styles, the film taking on a spectacular ever-shifting glow helping to smooth over the majority of its bumpier failings.
Assisting even more is the spellbinding work by Winslet. Along with her almost revelatory performance in husband Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, she is having a December without par. Over the past decade Winslet has quickly proven herself to be arguably the finest actress of her generation, her spellbinding work just another in a long line of stripped-down tour de force evenhanded portraits of complicated womanhood impossible to resist.
Yet she is not even in the scene that I’ll remember most. There is a moment in a college auditorium when one of the nondescript supporting players engages in an explosive bit of honesty that left me blindsided, much of what he says to his professor just as valid in the here and now regarding Bush et al almost as much as it was in the apologetic German aftermath of WWII. The accusations he levels are damning, but not in the direction you would probably expect, the level of his gut-wrenching clear-headedness splitting my gut in two and leading me to grab for the Kleenex.
It are these types of moments that lead my to feel The Reader, for all its myriad of problems and hiccups, is still nothing less than a passionately intricate emotionally cathartic success. Its innumerable levels has kept me thinking, the discussions I’ve entered into since its screening some of the most passionate and involving I’ve had all year. While not without some reservations Daldry’s third effort is still stunning, and all I hope is that this streak of intelligent success continues long into the foreseeable future and beyond.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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