The Reader

One cannot view a film such as The Reader without acknowledging that the way things are portrayed is problematic at best. This is a romantic drama about a fifteen-year-old boy and his summer sexual awakening with an older woman. That subject alone is taboo, especially in the world we currently live in where everyone is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein and his island of underage girls. Director Stephen Daldry and the producing team of Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Donna Gigliotti, and Redmond Morris have gone the extra mile to make sure that we will be as uncomfortable with this topic as possible by shooting copious amounts of sex and nudity with both characters, focusing on details that seemed determined to make us feel like pedophiles just for watching this film.

I was once told that the difference between artistic nude paintings and pornography is where the focus is. You can look at a Renaissance painting of a nude, and it is not the same as looking at an issue of Penthouse. One can make the same argument here. For much of the early scenes in The Reader, we are bombarded with so much graphic nudity, including several full frontal scenes of David Kross, who is playing fifteen in these moments, that it is not romantic, it is not stimulating, but it is disturbing. Perhaps this is the point that these filmmakers were trying for, but while it works to a degree on that level, it also distracts from the overall picture. 

This is a movie about morals and our own humanity. It’s about pride and consequences, too. It opens in 1958 with 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) becoming sick on a tram ride in an unnamed provincial city. He is helped home by 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). Michael learns that he has scarlet fever and spends several weeks recovering in his bed. Later, he tracks Hanna down to offer his thanks with a bouquet of flowers and they proceed to have a secret summer love affair during which Michael learns that she cannot read, so he reads books to her. He also notices that she is very secretive about certain elements of her past. This, among other things, causes tumult to enter their relationship. When Hanna is honored with a promotion for her good work performance, she abruptly quits and disappears. Michael is devastated to find that she is gone, her apartment vacated.

Eight years later, Michael is a student at Heidelberg University Law School. As part of one of his classes, he, along with his classmates, attends a war crimes trial of several former female SS guards accused of letting 300 Jewish women and children burn to death in a church fire rather than risk them escaping during a death march near Kraków in Poland. They didn’t start the fire but chose to let the Jews burn to death rather than risk their escape into the night. Michael is horrified to discover that one of the defendants is Hanna and that the other defendants are determined to place the blame for the deaths primarily on her. One of the key pieces of evidence being used against her is a report they claim Hanna wrote that would seem to indicate that she made the decision to leave the church doors locked. Michael knows that this is not possible since she cannot read or write, but Hanna would rather take the blame than admit to being illiterate. 

She takes the worst of the punishment meted out by the law, serving a life sentence in prison while the other women get a mere four years. While there, Michael begins to record books onto cassettes and send them to her in the mail. As the years go by, she uses these tapes to learn how to read and write and tries to write letters to him, but he doesn’t respond back. Twenty years pass, Michael (now played by Ralph Fiennes) marries, has a daughter, divorces, and continues to record his tapes for her. But when he learns that she is being paroled and that the prison is contacting him because she has no one else who may care for her once she is released, he finally pays her a visit on the inside. 

There are several moral questions being asked in this film. One heavily overshadows the other, though, and became the primary area of discussion when it came to this film. Everything we are seeing between David Kross and Kate Winslet is technically statutory rape. Even though David is over the age of consent, his character is not. It matters not that both parties are willing; he is underage and we are therefore seeing repeated scenes of statutory rape. This is not sexy nor is it erotic. Yet Stephen Daldry lingers on it like the erotic fiction letters people supposedly wrote in to the Penthouse forums. There is a way to portray this element of the story effectively and that would be without all the leering camera work. That, coupled with the later revelations about The Weinstein Company and Harvey Weinstein in particular, makes this film all the more unfortunate. 

We spend far too long on this element of the story, too. This is nearly the first forty-five minutes of the plot and its close-up nudity over and over again gets to the point of exhaustion. By the time Hanna packs up and disappears, it is long past the point when we are ready for it to be over.

Then the film shifts into a different gear. We are suddenly in the mid-60s, and Michael is at university. There are discussions about the difference between the law and justice and why that matters. We get this illustrated by the trial of the SS women and Hanna’s role at the camps. We see a similarity between her relationship with Michael and what was happening in the camps. She would have some of the Jewish women saved from being executed so that they could read to her. This is painted at first as a mercy, something the Jewish girls felt elevated her at first. But she could also quickly change and send those self-same girls off to their deaths. It’s not explicitly stated, but it is hinted that she might have been intimate with them, too. As a guard, she, along with the others on trial, chose ten people regularly to be sent off to their deaths to make room for incoming prisoners. Hanna is the only one willing to admit to doing so; the others on trial insist they did not do this despite Hanna’s testimony.

This is a tough role to carry out for Kate Winslet. She was initially cast in it before scheduling conflicts forced her to back out. Nicole Kidman then stepped into the role but got pregnant and had to bow out. By then, Kate was able to retake the role. After the release of The Reader, Kate made it known that she was done with on-screen nudity, perhaps because of some of the backlash she got from this film or perhaps for the reason she initially gave. She had stated that she didn’t want to be known for being the actress that always did nudity and that she couldn’t “keep getting away with it.” Though she hasn’t completely abandoned nude scenes in films, she has greatly reduced them. 

When The Reader hit theaters, it became a bit of a running joke that people didn’t see it. Hugh Jackman, hosting the Oscars the following year, made it part of his opening montage that he didn’t see it, suggesting that the long lines at the theater, lines for people going to see Iron Man for a second time, kept him from going to The Reader. This stigma is only partially true, though. The Reader made about $109 million at the box office, boosted by post-Oscar nomination numbers. It wasn’t a blockbuster, but it did turn a decent profit.

What it didn’t do, though, was churn up enough conversation about its questionable moral messages about sexual awakenings and what is right and wrong when it comes to following orders. Hanna asks at one point, “What would you have done?” She states: “If we’d opened the doors, there would have been chaos. How could we have restored order? It happened so fast. It was snowing. The bombs. The flames. There were flames all over the village. Then the screaming began, and got worse and worse. And if they’d all come rushing out, we couldn’t just let them escape. We couldn’t. We were responsible for them!” She then asks if she shouldn’t have applied for the job in the first place, to which she gets silence for an answer. We know the answer, and it doesn’t need to be said. Her lack of understanding behind her own words “We were responsible for them” also speaks volumes about her frame of mind.

This is not an easy film to watch, even knowing what you are getting into. Kate Winslet gave two amazing performances this year, for The Reader and for Revolutionary Road. Either could have gotten her the Oscar, but the Academy gave it to her for The Reader. That will be part of her legacy as an actress. Neither is a pleasant film, but The Reader is particularly challenging to get through. Still, it asks some interesting questions and is a compelling drama. But the concept, especially in the first half, is so icky and shot in a way to make it very uncomfortable to watch, making it a hard film to recommend to anyone.

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella, Redmond Morris, and Donna Gigliotti

Best Director: Stephen Daldry

Best Actress: Kate Winslet (won)

Best Adapted Screenplay: David Hare

Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins and Chris Menges

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Release Date: December 12, 2008

Running Time: 124 minutes

Rated R

Starring: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Lena Olin, and Bruno Ganz

Directed by: Stephen Daldry