With the glut of Nazi-themed movies towards the end of 2008, The Reader stands out for more than its use of German accents. Divided nicely into three sections, Act I concerns the affair between teenager Michael Berg (David Kross) and 30-something Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet + make-up). Based on the popular novel by Bernhard Schlink, this first section suffers most from its literary roots. You can tell screenwriter David Hare is struggling to cram in everything from the novel. The story's so rushed that it's hard to buy the affair as anything more than a horny teenager and a creepy older woman. Sure, there's enough sex and nudity to hold your attention, but the emotions don't ring true enough to last the rest of the movie.
Things pick up when the movie shifts from the emotional to the intellectual in Act 2. Now a law student, Michael is studying a trial of former Nazis, including one Hanna Schmitz. Now knowing why Hanna was so secretive during the affair, Michael needs to understand how the woman he loved could have done such terrible things. Though anyone who's read Hannah Arendt knows the answer to that. If Arendt's "banality of evil" theory isn't as fresh now as it was 45 years ago, it still makes a good subject for a movie. This section is where the movie best escapes the label of literary adaptation.
Which brings us to Act III, in which Michael is now played by a cold, unemotional Raph Fiennes. As we see what happens to Michael and Hanna in the decades following the trial, the movie feels its most literary. But it does lead to the movie's strongest scene, between Michael and Ilana Mather (Lena Olin), a Holocaust survivor who lived to write about it. Olin is strong and unsympathetic as she tells Michael there are no lessons to gain from the concentration camps. The added intensity she gives the movie in just one scene makes me wonder how she escaped awards attention.
The more noticeable performance though belongs to Kate Winslet. Hanna is a very difficult character to play. She's cold, secretive, unemotional, and unsympathetic. So Winslet earns her Oscar nod in playing all the layers of her character, making you want to see what she's hiding. She's at her best in the moments where the exterior cracks, like her childlike glee over the stories Michael tells her. But while the film tries to make her sympathetic as it goes on, that's not something she can ever really be. Her performance ends up being more intriguing than moving. The Academy clearly picked her in this film over Revolutionary Road because she hit the right boxes: pretty actress who makes herself uglier, Holocaust, accent, ages over time, Nazis.
Despite the strong performances of Winslet, Kross, and Fiennes, emotion is ultimately swallowed by the overwhelming stench of Oscarbait, thanks to the now thrice-nominated direction of Stephen Daldry. The music - so sad and pretty - takes over storytelling duties as we see Michael walk slowly and mournfully every five minutes or so. The cinematography, the art direction, all pristine, but a little too much. There are individual moments in The Reader, mostly involving Winslet and Olin, that elevate the movie above something just made to get awards. But those moments don't add up to a whole quite as powerful as the filmmakers would like you to believe.
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