The Reader

The Reader is the story of a 15-year-old German boy who becomes involved with an older woman and what happens to the both of them later in life.

Zaukul's Review
I thought the themes brought up by the movie were very significant and affecting. All the main characters' performances were especially good.

Watched on June 29, 2009 and rated 4.

Nuyhij's Response
The Reader is a film that any self-respecting liberal person would feel uncomfortable about liking. How can one praise a film that humanizes and makes sympathetic a Nazi war criminal, a guard at Auschwitz who regularly participated in the selection of concentration camp prisoners to be sent to their deaths? Many reviewers have dismissed this film in a sort of knee-jerk reaction because it veers from the politically correct viewpoint that all Nazis are automatically monstrous evil beings or simpering, bureaucratic Eichmanns just following orders without regard to the morality of their actions.

The truth—if we can ever get to the truth of that period of German history—is far more varigated, more shades of grey than the stark red and black of the ubiquitous swastika banners of the time. Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet in a performance that broadcasts vulnerability without mitigating any of the horrific actions her character participated in) was, if not a victim of the times, then just a woman who got caught up with the whirlwind of change that was Hitler's Third Reich. She fell into the job of an SS guard like so many other Germans who needed work at the time.

The film, which opens in 1958, after the events of Hanna's earlier life as a guard at Auschwitz, brings up uneasy questions. Hanna is clearly sympathetic, especially since most of her life's decisions seem to have been made with the express purpose of hiding her illiteracy. (Hanna joined the SS when she was 21 to avoid a promotion at Siemens that would have required her to read.) But Hanna is also clearly culpable; she did participate in unforgiveable actions of her own free will. She was so ashamed of her inability to read that she took part in the murder of hundreds of people in order to hide it.

This is where the theme of literature plays an important role in the function of the film and the message that one can take away from it. The illiterate Hanna, without disclosing her inability to read to either Michael Berg when the film begins (David Kross as the young Michael, with Ralph Fiennes playing the character when he is older) or the Jewish women she recruited from the camp before the events of the film, has them read works out loud to her, from Homer to Schiller to Chekov. A particularly moving scene shows Hanna crying when Michael reads about the death of Hector in The Odyssey. Literature does not redeem Hanna (just as it did not redeem Hitler or anyone else who participated in the wholesale slaughter of human beings), but it does give her depth and complicate her character.

And I believe that that is what the film is about. The Reader is not a movie that romanticizes the life of a Nazi war criminal; rather, it is a film about the difficulty of understanding how ordinary people make such extraordinary and horrifying decisions. It is a film about coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung as the Germans say) and all the thorny and contradictory forces involved.