♥♥♥♥♥
+ Best Adaptation of the Year
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| Simple, elegant poster for Stephen Daldry's The Reader |
The Reader is an adaptation of a bestselling novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink (Self's Murder (2001)).
Michael is a German, who is remembering times decades ago, when he was a teenager in post-war Berlin 1958 and had an affair with an older woman, Hanna. An affair with an intimate, romantic connection and a physical one that was also centered on another activity; his reading novels aloud to her.
The affair profoundly changes Michael, as he learns later on that SPOILER Hanna was an SS camp officer in Auschwitz, the worst of the Nazi concentration camps.
The question of guilt is an issue in The Reader, as Michael is harrowed by an indistinct sense of guilt, and Hanna is prosecuted for the murder of 300 Jews that burned under her supervision in a church no less. Her sense of guilt is never explicit or very obvious, but it is there, especially developing out of Michael's gift to her, the gift of literacy. Michael is a very different, more sensitive individual, who has to process and find peace within himself for having a passionate affair with that woman in the course of the film.
I found the ending, in which SPOILER he decides to drive his daughter to Hanna's grave and tell her of their relation, profoundly moving and really, really good. Sometimes wounds are simply healed by letting the truth come out.
The Reader decides against mainstream dramatic solutions, e.g. said ending, and the fact that none of Hanna's crimes are shown. It is a romantic period drama for thinking audiences, and acquaintance with some of the literary classics used by Michael in the film will only heighten the experience. Knowledge of the death camps and Holocaust is essential to understand the weight of Michael's burden in his life following Hanna's incarceration.
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| Kate Winslet and David Kross in Stephen Daldry's The Reader |
Contrasting the intellectual side of The Reader, however, is its sensual scenes with young German actor David Kross (Tough Enough (2006)) and Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road (2008)). This whole part of the film is beautifully achieved; The Reader seems to allow itself a human curiosity about sexuality and bodies, very much like a sexual novel often does, (and perhaps like Schlink's does.) Besides, both performers are extremely well-acting; Winslet won her first Oscar for her work, and Kross is actually as good as her, as the young man.
In other parts in the fine cast, we see great actors Ralph Fiennes, Lena Olin and Bruno Ganz.
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| David Kross, reading, and Kate Winslet, trying actively to understand what she is hearing, in Stephen Daldry's The Reader |
The details:
Enjoyment of the film is heightened by general interest in its issues and Germany in the decades following WWII. The cast is comprised of Germans except for the few international stars already mentioned, and The Reader really 'nails' it in making its characters, though they speak English, seem very naturally German. Kross is naturally German, and Winslet, both in dress, physique, expressions and intonation, is so like a real, solid, German woman that she feels as though she could easily be Hanna Schmitz.
The film has a literary quality to it, beginning with a person's sickness and ending with that same person's confession many years later, and thus resounds its English writer David Hare and English director Stephen Daldry's previous masterpiece, The Hours (2002), which investigated English author Virginia Woolf and the impact of her novel Mrs. Dalloway in herself and other women in subsequent decades. The Reader is also a salute to the power of the written word and novels and has a complexity and depth to it that is intriguing and similar to what is often found in a good book.
The Hours is a very tough act to follow, and The Reader doesn't reach the searing, emotional heights and profundity of that film, but it remains a rock-solid narrative and a very fine film.
Daldry has since directed the interesting but (even) less good Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) and is now in post with his latest, Trash (2014), a really interesting-sounding film set in a Third World country with Martin Sheen and Rooney Mara. - Can't wait to see that!
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Budget: 32 mil. $
Box office: 109.9 mil. $
= Big hit
What do you think of The Reader?
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