The Reader

It’s an old Hollywood theory that if you make a film dealing with the Holocaust and release it during Christmas time you’re sure to cash in on gushing critical fervor, and subsequently awards will flow through. The Reader takes this theory mightily serious, and exploits so many aspects of December “prestige pics”, you feel like throwing up more than half the time you are watching the screen.

The film was made by Stephen Daldry, who had all but disappeared from the film industry since his 2002 film The Hours. The six-year hiatus has done little to hone his craft, as he makes a film so mind-numbingly boring and misguided that the audience is never sure what to take seriously, and what to pass off as sexual fantasy. It is so blindingly catering toward Oscar, yet so furiously trying to seem sensual that neither aspects seem sincere.

The film opens with Michael (Ralph Fiennes), who is in his fifties and is an incredibly closeted and secretive man. He mopes around with a face of doom and disappointment, even his daughter is not sure what to do in his presence. Why does Michael act this way? Well, the film flashes back to take further investigation.

A young Michael (David Kross) gets caught in a rainstorm in freezing weather. An older woman (Kate Winslet) helps him home where he finds out that he has acquired Scarlet Fever. After months of rehabilitation, he goes back and visits the woman for her help that fateful day. Her name is Hanna Schmitz. They both make advancing glances at each other, until the two are wrapped in a passionate love affair that lasts for one summer.

Then, suddenly, Hanna has gone. Michael moves on and attends law school, and hopes the opportunity will bring him further life experiences beyond his relationship with Hanna. That is, until he sees Hanna again. As a project for his law class, Michael attends a courtroom case, and finds Hanna on trial for war crimes. What crime? Being a ruthless guard at a Nazi concentration camp.

As a Holocaust film, this movie is simply a joke. The movie could care less about the subhuman activities that transpired during that dark time in history. What does it teach Michael to learn that the love of his young life was an organizer of mass murder? He doesn’t seem to learn much of anything—he just mopes around with his hands in his face. There really isn’t anywhere for these characters to go in terms of an arc, and the set-up to the romance between Hanna and Michael is something out of a high school fantasy.

There are two or three redeemable moments, particularly coming from the performances of Winslet and Fiennes, but a majority of the time, the characters stand around in laborious indecision. Sure, David Kross has a tough role to grasp, but most of the time, the young Michael comes off as whiny and annoying, when he’s supposed to seem endearing. There is exactly no charm within any of these characters, and that makes it impossible for us to care about any of them.

David Hare’s adaptation seems quite half-hearted. As a screenwriter you have to know the difference between adapting a novel and just re-writing the book in a screenplay format. With a pace like Catholic mass, the movie makes Benjamin Button seem succinct by comparison. The Reader is not my kind of film, to be honest, but I did not expect this film to be one of my least favorite of the year. It certainly is the most disappointing.

 

Directed by Stephen Daldry