In The Reader, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp worker, Hanna Schmitz, struggling to keep an air tight lid on her role in the Nazi horror show. She resumes her life after the war by getting an anonymous job as a street car conductor in Berlin. And she works at her job as if the fate of the world depended on her taking tickets and keeping litter off the floor. Multiply this kind of commitment to work, order and cleanliness by millions of people and it's no wonder Germans thought they were the Master Race. Who could compete with that? But it's also no wonder they lost the war. Who can keep that up for long without cutting off blood flow to vital organs like the heart?
Hanna is tormented and driven, friendless, before starting a love affair with an underage boy, Michael Berg. His tender readings to her of classic works from the Western cannon, both great and small, help to thaw her painfully frozen humanity. Hanna herself is illiterate, hence the title, another shameful secret she is careful to hide. Winslet plays this tormented role with the white hot intensity of a religious zealot seeking salvation while believing that she doesn't deserve it at all. Truly amazing.
Ralph Fiennes plays Hanna's lover boy as an adult. Now a barrister, he is divorced and seems to wander around clueless under a dark cloud which we assume has something to do with having lost touch with Hanna, his first love, and the civilized life and culture of his nation before the barbarians torched and trampeled it all. Ultimately, Hanna and Michael reconnect again and, among other events, he helps the former Nazi cog with her self-initiated project of learning to read.
It's a moving, redemptive glimmer in a unrelentingly bleak film. I respect Stephen Daldry, the film maker, for not giving us a happy ending or even a good cry. This film left an acrid, charred taste in my mouth and that seems about right. WWII was a nightmarishly barbaric. We all think that means the Holocaust, and it does, but it also means Hiroshima and Dresden. Both sides were guilty of extreme crimes against humanity. Somehow love reaches through this mess and enables us to live again. Gee, I dunno, wouldn't it be better if we just stayed a little more conscious and didn't have to go through this kind of horror show again and again? Maybe we should take a vow to become makers of history, rather than just readers. Towards that end, this film should be required viewing for all the big bank CEO's and hedge fund managers who have gotten irresponsibly rich by playing fast and loose with the rules -- and all those who looked the other way because they were also getting (proportionately) rich.
2 comments:
I agree with you on Kate Winslet and her acting, I actually found all the acting superb. Ironic that Fiennes started out his career as Amon Geoth and is now, 16 years later, on the other side as Michael Berg. In total,the acting was the best about the movie. for me, it did not hold together, it had many interesting, outstanding and succinct 'capsules', like the University scenes with Bruno Ganz (one of the best known and in my mind finest German stage actors), or the love /reading scenes, or the encrustedly rigid and loveless German dinner table scenes, but it did not seem to blend into a convincing narrative and left me rather uninvolved in that sense. Where I did get involved though, and this was finely crafted, was the 'Germaness' of the movie. The terribly rigid fifties and the cracking of the societal ice of the late sixties initiated by the young university generation and their unease were extremely well captured, coal carrying, budding morality and all. It made me go back to my childhood experiences and let me appreciate this country that I live in ever more.
I also thought that Winslet's performance deserved the academy award: her performance as a woman haunted has stayed with me, and I found her musty, distasteful, masculinized, and unerotic (if there is such a word). For me to be unmoved by a fornicating naked woman I believe reflects on her performance. The musty unerotic character was also carried by the film technique--settings and color.
But the movie as a whole did not do it for me: I found it disjointed, a little incredulous, with a soap-operish underlying structure. For example, farmished is one thing, but the intimation that Fiennes personality is so scared by his abandonment by his lover, that he goes from being guarded and defensive to blabbing to his daughter (and subsequently to others to show openness?) about a 15 year old romanticized escapade, the visit to his mother to tell her(?) that he is getting divorced after not having seen her for a long time, and there are others-----these kinds of events feel like poorly crafted contrivances.
And finally I personally am angry about people making fanciful, artsy-fartsy films about the holocaust. Maybe that needs to happen for us to come to terms with inexplicable horror, but if so, I don't like it.
Post a Comment