Category | Arts & Living

Movie Review: “The Reader”

Published on February 10, 2009 by Daniel Singleton

How am I going to review “The Reader?” I don’t want to fall back on clichés. I don’t want to call it “sappy” and “sentimental,” or say that it “stinks like a Lifetime Original movie.” But dear God, what else can I say about something that uses the moral ambiguity surrounding Germany’s role in the Holocaust as a springboard for soap opera sex? Alright, enough talk. Here I go. The movie has three parts. The first part is one of those steamy sex epics that show up in Lifeti… um, the cheap romance books sold at Wal-Mart.

The plot barely exists. In West Germany circa 1958, a teenager named Michael meets a mysterious older woman on the street, follows her home and makes sweet love to her. Over and over and over again. Then again. I’m not lying, guys; this movie has more sex than a hooker. But don’t worry, all you sensitive types who can’t take steam with sweetness, they stuffed in a bunch of scenes where he reads Chekhov to her.

Alright, the plot sucks and Michael is the same naïve hero we’ve seen in a thousand bad romances, but the movie isn’t hopelessly cheap and sleazy because the older woman, Hanna, keeps us guessing. Who is she? Why is she “teaching” Michael? Boredom? Loneliness? The movie never says. Flash forward six years. Michael is studying law, and his teacher asks him to watch a war crimes trial. Apparently six SS women let 300 Jews burn to death when the prison caught fire. Now, Michael hasn’t seen Hanna since their affair ended, so imagine his surprise when he walks into court and sees her sitting at the bench.   

And here’s where the movie finally grows a brain. We immediately want to throw rocks at most movie Nazis, even the not-so-bad ones like Commander Herzog in “The Counterfeiters,” but we can’t hate Hanna because we know that she’s just an ordinary girl who was unlucky enough to listen to a madman like Hitler. You want the sad truth? We’d have killed just as many Jews if we were her. There’s one brilliant scene where Hanna actually asks the judges what they would have done and the movie holds the silence for almost thirty seconds to give us time to answer the question ourselves

Part two is loaded with guilt: Hanna feels guilty for killing 300 people, Michael feels guilty for having sex with her and everybody feels guilty for ignoring the Holocaust. It’s not very insightful, but hey, give the movie some credit for showing how guilt clouds people’s judgment and leads to bad choices and more guilt. Unfortunately, that new brain disappears with the next flash forward.

Part three takes place ten years later, when Hanna is in jail and Michael has grown up into a sissy Ralph Fiennes who thinks about Hanna every minute. I don’t know what’s sappier: his lingering feelings for her or the fact that he starts sending her homemade books-on-tape in one of those “powerful” moments of selflessness that are reserved for super-wimpy characters like him. What happened to the guilt and the intelligent dialogue about why normal people do bad things? It’s gone. Some people think director Stephen Daldry is an evil bastard who cared more about a third-rate love story than the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust, but my theory is less cynical: I think he was afraid that too much intelligence would put us to sleep. Either way, the last forty minutes take everything about the movie that rocked and flush it down the toilet.