The Reader: Movie Review (2009)

Directed by Stephen Daldry, written by David Hare, 123 minutes, rated R.

Stephen Daldry follows his Academy Award-winning 2002 film “The Hours” with “The Reader,” which is marked by superb performances by Kate Winslet and David Kross, a fine performance by Ralph Fiennes, and a cameo by Lena Olin that’s so searing in its sophistication and directness, just try looking away from her during her brief appearance onscreen.

Unfortunately, the film also is pockmarked by a shaky script that becomes less involving in its second half. That’s a disappointment, but it doesn’t ruin the movie. Throughout, the acting saves it, with Winslet, after this performance, almost galvanizing her chances for an Academy Award for either her work here or in “Revolutionary Road.”

Perhaps both.

Screenwriter David Hare based the story on Bernhard Schlink’s novel, and what he and Daldry crafted from it is a movie of three parts. The first is a coming-of-age tale that involves the sexual relationship between a 15-year-old boy named Michael (Kross) and a 30-something woman named Hanna (Winslet). The setting is Germany, the time is 1955, and the couple meet one day when Michael becomes ill just outside Hanna’s home. Briskly and with an edge, she cleans him up, sends him packing and likely thinks nothing else of the situation until, three months later, he’s on her doorstep with flowers.

So, where to go from here? For them, the answer is sex, which the movie doesn’t judge--it just explores. Soon, each is naked (in this film, quite liberally and often) and their affair has begun. This is Michael’s first sexual experience. For Hanna, that’s hardly the case, but in her dead eyes, which conceal complications we’ll only come to understand later, she goes through the motions, giving the “kid,” as she calls him, what he wants, so long as he agrees to read to her.

“Read to me first, kid,” she says. “Then we make love.”

In print, that line might sound amusing--you can almost hear Dietrich saying it, likely with ribbons of smoke curling from her mouth--but in the film, there is nothing funny about it. These are two people who grow to love each other over the course of a summer. And then, just when Michael is consumed most by Hanna, she disappears.

It’s in the second part of the story that Michael comes upon Hanna again. Now a 23-year-old law student, he attends a trial as part of a class retreat and is shocked to find that Hanna is among several women being tried for her role in selecting people to be murdered at Nazi concentration camps during the war. As he watches, he’s not only faced with the horror of who his first love was, but also with whether he should come forward with key information that could change her life forever.

If the latter half of the plot sounds vague, it’s meant to be--the movie is far more complex than anything discussed here, and it should remain that way. Threading throughout the story is its third element--Fiennes as the adult version of Michael, who is looking back upon his life, his experiences with Hanna, and how it all interacts with his relationship with his daughter, which proves to be the film’s dullest subplot.

In fact, it’s an unnecessary inclusion, particularly since her addition is too much for this already dense movie to contain. Moreover, unlike “The Hours,” which seamlessly fractured time, wended through it and used it to its benefit to construct a satisfying whole, “The Reader” feels labored in its telling. It’s trying so hard to stitch and construct something profound, the effort competes with the performances, stealing away some of the rawness of the emotions.

Though not all of them. Winslet, Kross and Olin (who appears at the end) are too good to allow that to fully happen.

Grade: B