The Reader - A voce alta

Kate Winslet, I absolutely adore her, she's my favorite actress of all time. I still can't believe that she hadn't won an Oscar, her first nomination was in 1995 with Sense and Sensibility. Finally after 14 long years, she finally won the coveted award with the movie The Reader. I finally was able to see this movie the other day and it blew me away, I'm still debating if this really was my favorite Kate Winslet performance, but once again with a strong cast telling a powerful story, The Reader was definitely one of the best films out of 2008. So many holocaust films have been made, it's hard to make another that stands out, but we really haven't had a story where the Nazi guards were on trial. A lot of people debate if this movie is trying too hard to push sympathy on Kate Winslet's character, but my love for this film is to just show that they were human as well, hard to believe, but that our mothers, sisters, friends, whoever could have done something so shameful.

Michael Berg in 1995 Berlin watches an S-Bahn pass by, flashing back to a tram in 1958 Neustadt. A teenage Michael gets off because he is feeling sick and wanders around the streets afterwards, finally pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he vomits. Hanna Schmitz, the tram conductor, comes in and assists him in returning home. The 36 year old Hanna seduces and begins an affair with the 15 year old boy. During their liaisons, at her apartment, he reads to her literary works he is studying. After a bicycling trip, Hanna learns she is being promoted to a clerical job at the tram company. She abruptly moves without leaving a trace. The adult Michael, a lawyer, at Heidelberg University law school in 1966. As part of a special seminar taught by Professor Rohl, a camp survivor, he observes a trial of several women who were accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the death march following the 1944 evacuation of Auschwitz. Hanna is one of the defendants. Stunned, Michael visits a former camp himself. The trial divides the seminar, with one student angrily saying there is nothing to be learned from it other than that evil acts occurred and that the older generation of Germans should kill themselves for their failure to act then. But Michael is conflicted on what to do, if to speak out on Hannah's behalf on some of her innocence in the murders or keep quiet.

This is one of the most powerful movies I have ever seen, it was so incredible and just heart breaking. One of the things I respected about the film was the way they handled the awkward "love story" between Michael and Hannah, she's older, he's younger, but it's not even a perverted thing, so strange to say that. I don't know how to put it exactly, but their connection was real and in some sense they both needed each other. If you have the chance to see this movie, I seriously suggest that you take it, the powerful performances really make this film captivating. The story is so heart wrenching and painful, but was told so well. Kate now finally has the award she's deserved for so long and pulls in a terrific performance with The Reader.

10/10

Before I start reviewing, let me say something personal: As a German, one can hardly watch movies about the Holocaust, WWII or any related topic unbiased. As I have discovered myself, no German family is without a history related to the Third Reich, almost none are without grave guilt, or at least the fear thereof, and most who say otherwise either lie knowingly, or simply try to evade further inquiry.

Reading some of the other reviews, I realized that for me, the movie conveyed something slightly, but decisively different: It is not so much about understanding HOW people could ever do the things they did, but rather how it is possible, that people we love, and people that have been loved by people we love could be so guilty and so loving, so despicable and lovable at the same time. It is about how we expect the guilt to show up somehow, how we expect to know the killer, the monster, at first sight and say: how could anyone not have seen it? Yet we have to admit sooner or later, that we were wrong, or were we? The question really is: How could I have ever loved someone who did things as horrible and disgusting as Hannah did? And just as much: If I am unmerciful now, having learned of their guilt, is it because they did what they did, or because they disappointed my own belief in their innocence?

At one point, Hanna Schmitz asks the judge: "What would you have done?", and I think that therein lies an even more disturbing and unsettling question: What would I have done? What would you have done? How can anyone know for sure what WE would done? It is too easy to think of oneself as morally sound, with a firm belief in what is right and wrong. It's what Germans call the "mercy of late birth" - the luxury of not having been in the position to make that choice.

So, what made this movie worth giving the full 10 points out of 10? It is well-crafted, well-played, believable, at times even beautiful. It captures both the fascination Michael feels with Hannah, and his disbelief, even disgust while exploring the ugly truth about her past. It conveys the struggle between our compassion and the reluctance to show mercy against the ones who did not. It leaves the viewer with the same, disturbing questions that have not been answered sufficiently in the past 60 years (nor will they ever be). It does not provide simple answers, but rather raises more questions, left to be unanswered. As Lena Olin's Character says: "If you want Catharsis, go to the theater!"

Other than providing beautiful, well-toned cinematography, a well-written script, love of detail and convincing performances even by the supporting cast - what more can you expect from a truly great movie?

We don't know. We think we do but we don't. We make decisions or sometimes decisions are made for us but we think we've made them. Then suddenly, there we are. We can't be certain how we got there or where we will be when everything settles but we do know that we are alive. Some experiences are life altering and we can run from them or embrace them. Staying to see them through though can bring incredible bliss but also tormented turmoil. We just never know. One such experience was had by a young Michael Berg (David Kross) and is chronicled in Stephen Daldry's THE READER. How could he know that when he pulled into an alley to be sick that he would meet the woman who would shape his entire life? How could he know that getting close to her would pull him the furthest he's ever been from himself?

Of course, when you're a sixteen-year-old boy and a woman who looks like Kate Winslet disrobes in front of you in the privacy of her bathroom, how much thought really goes into the decision that has presented itself? However little it is, it is certainly less than is warranted. This is especially true in West Germany of 1958. This is a Germany that is uncertain how to proceed, how to be its new self in the eyes of the world and the eyes of its very own future generations. Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a compassionate woman but also abrasive and stern. Winslet strikes the perfect balance between directness and desire in Schmitz, making her complexities part of her appeal. She is a good fifteen years older than the young Berg and she knows much better than he of her country's history. What he knows, he has read in books, been taught in school. What she knows, she lived first hand. So when the two come together, naked in each other's arms, the meeting is as redemptive as it is passionate. Berg is just happy to be in love and having sex but Schmitz is washing herself clean with the youthful vigor of Germany's tomorrow.

The summer ends and so does the affair, as one would expect. Just when it would seem that the two would never meet again, life steps in to ensure that past decisions, perhaps made in haste, can come to see their consequences. Berg has grown some and is a college man, studying to be a lawyer, when he catches sight of Hanna Schmitz again. Their latest chance encounter is far less exciting though as he sees her on a class outing to a courthouse. Schmitz is on trial for crimes against humanity for her time as an officer in the Nazi party during the Second World War. Berg's memory of his first love would now become a question of his own morality. How could he love someone who was now accused of such atrocities? How could he be so intimate with someone he apparently never truly knew? And yet, now that he knows her past, does he really know how her past came to be? After all, what is the face of evil? Is it Hanna Schmitz or is it something incredibly bigger than her?

Ralph Fiennes is the future of Germany. He plays Berg as an adult. His life is orderly, very clean, crisp and cold. He made decisions that made him the man he is and he can never say whether they were the right ones or not. What he can see is that we all make decisions that either hurt or harm other people and that the atrocities committed by his past generations are not as far outside the realm of understanding as he might have originally thought. More importantly, redemption is not that far either.

"Every single day -- 365 days a year -- an attack against children occurs that is 10 times greater than the death toll from the World Trade Center...We know how to prevent these deaths -- we have the biological knowledge and tools to stop this public health travesty, but we're not yet doing it." Jean-Pierre Habicht, professor of epidemiology and nutritional sciences at Cornell.

Eight million of the eleven million childhood deaths a year could easily be prevented. That's because almost 60 percent of deaths of children under 5 in the developing world are due to malnutrition and its interactive effects on preventable diseases. Is this not a holocaust?

An old Soviet piece of gossip had it that Comrade Khruschev was interrupted during his famous 'secret' speech before the Communist Party elite when he denounced Stalin's crimes in 1956, three years after Stalin's death. A voice from the audience shouted, "Why didn't you speak out against these crimes when Comrade Stalin was committing them?" Khruschev looked up from his speech and asked loudly, "Who said that?" A long silence ensued after which Khruschev observed, "That is why."

When you see "The Reader", ask yourself why you are doing nothing about the holocaust which is happening every year to the poorest children of the world. Is it because you are afraid to be seen as being 'silly' or too 'socialist' or 'soft hearted' or because the system demands that you pay attention to the important things of life like obeying your bosses and keeping order and besides, "What can a lowly person like myself do about the situation" and you're too busy speculating on what the real estate market will be doing in the coming months and finding a pair of jeans at Jeans West which will fit.....

Michael meets Hanna when he is fifteen. Unbeknownst to Michael, he is coming down with scarlet fever. He is throwing up in an alley on a very rainy day when Hanna, the tram conductor, stops to offer him a warm place to rest until he feels better. Hanna also cleans up his vomit from the pavement. Hanna believes in orderliness and cleanliness. This penchant for order is apparent from the beginning of their relationship and these traits lead her to offer Michael baths and to bathe herself as well and as the movie progresses the motherly Hanna and her son-like friend begin to explore the attractions which flow from such erotic circumstances.

Both Hanna and Michael are full of hidden passions. Michael could have been a Heydrich in Prague, had he been born 15 years earlier. He is clearly 'officer material'. Hanna, on the other hand, is a working class woman born 30 years earlier into a society which would tell women that their highest aspirations could be fulfilled by staying in the kitchen with the children when they weren't engaged in taking in a church service. with the family. Education was unnecessary. Both Hanna and Michael are intelligent and attractive. Both are turned on by the doors which are opened to them by great literature. Both are also social products of their own German culture, with its various and sundry facets of puritanical, psychological repression, including a kind of reserve which leads to the peculiarly German goodness of keeping one's mouth shut in public about things political, things which the authorities have well in hand. Hanna's fear of exposing her own illiteracy and Michael's fear of public condemnation as a young law student at speaking up for Hanna in a court of law are the stuff of tragedy.

Sound familiar?

Even after many steamy sexual encounters, Hanna is shocked by passages in D.H. Lawrence's LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER, telling Michael that it is the equivalent of smut and that he should stop reading from it, almost as his mother would have. But clearly, Michael is not attracted to Hanna because she is a mother replica--Oedipus, no. One has only to compare and contrast Michael's screen mother with Kate Winslett's Hanna to know that.

However, it is 'klip und klar' that Hanna loves Michael and he loves her but, unbeknownst to them both when they are together, their love runs very, very deeply. They might believe that they will get over their summertime romance as time goes by, but the reality is that such love does not die, no matter what happens: there are no conditions for it.

There are elements of Fassbinder's "Ali, Fear Eats the Heart" and "Berlin Alexanderplatz" in "The Reader". "Sophie's Choice" also comes to mind. See this movie and be prepared to cry for humanity because as Thoreau observed, ""Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." Methnks this is especially so in cultures as deeply built on the authoritarian personality character structure as the German one is.

Kate Winslet is just outstanding in this very interesting film that is almost two stories-in-one. The first part is a sexual story of an older woman having affairs with a teenage boy and the second part is her war crimes tale and what happens afterward. The first is a somewhat happy jaunt of a short story and the second is a very serious and depressing story. That's where Winslet really shines. Obviously, she's developed into an an outstanding actress.

The second part is what most people, I assume, will remember about this film. Can "Hanna Schmitz," a Nazi employee (so to speak), who was part of concentration camps, be a sympathetic character? To me, that's what it looked like that's the question the story was asking. The answer may have come in the final minutes of the movie when her ex-lover "Michael Berg," now grown up and played by Ralph Fiennes, confronts a survivor of the camp. That, too, was very intense and interesting scene. Lena Olin is riveting as "Rose/Illana Mather."

"The Reader" was full of quiet, but intense scenes. This is a very thought-provoking film, especially for one that doesn't start off that way but look almost like some soft-porn flick to get our attention. It is anything but that.

For Germans, this film must bring out many emotions and thoughts. Guilt and forgiveness are just two of the issues that are dealt with in this unique film. "Hanna Schmitz" turns out to be an incredibly simple-yet-complex person, unlike any I've encountered on film in a long time. You see her in all kinds of light, both good and bad.

Kudos, too, to David Kross' acting as the young Michael Berg. It must be strange for someone his age (barely turned 18) to do the scenes he did with 30-something Winslet.

Overall, a very different and excellent film that stays with you and makes you ponder its main characters.