I have never given much thought to the number of movies made with The Holocaust as a theme. Helpfully, the press notes for The Reader quote director Stephen Daldry as saying there have been 252.
(The number is ostensibly from a Columbia University professor's book on the subject).
Of course, by making The Reader -- a movie that seems tailored to snag Kate Winslet a sixth Oscar nomination (or seventh, depending on how Revolutionary Road is received) -- Daldry has rendered that number out-of-date.
So how to remember The Reader in a field of 250-plus? It's the one with all the sex. Okay, that narrows it to a field of, arguably, two alongside The Night Porter. (Geekier cineastes than me will probably point to more).
Specifically, The Reader is the one where Kate Winslet gets naked with a teenaged boy -- like The Summer Of '42, except with ex-Nazis.
There's another secret too, one intrinsic to the title, all of which is supposed to be a metaphor for the wartime generation of Germans whose practical "amnesia" of the war -- a Pandora's box of shamefully withheld secrets -- putatively messed up the angry generation of young Germans that followed.
You'd get all this from the Bernhard Schlink novel, a polarizing work in its native Germany that has been taught in school as a way of understanding the country's difficult road to acknowledgement of its guilt.
It is, however, difficult to ponder metaphors when you're watching Kate Winslet simulating sex.
That, plus one egregious case of miscasting (Ralph Fiennes as the adult version of our young, blond German boy), make The Reader a rather slow-moving film in search of what it wants to say.
When we meet Michael Berg (David Kross), he is a 15-year-old in the '50s, vomiting and collapsing in the street from scarlet fever. He's helped home by a thirtysomething woman named Hanna (Winslet), whom he feels compelled to thank with flowers after a three-month convalescence.
Flash to the '80s, and Ralph Fiennes is a professional lawyer kicking some young thing out of bed. He is moody, obviously hampered in his relationships, and, well, moody. It takes some time to figure out that this is Michael, they are so physically unalike. In fact, if the movie had been done in chronological order like the book, the first time it saw Fiennes, the audience would be saying "Who the heck is that?"
Okay, let's go back to the sex (the flowers being the icebreaker). Hanna, a tram-worker by day, takes pains to keep their affair secret. Michael, meanwhile, is so besotted, he turns down advances from girls his own age, so he can get back to Hanna and their two favourite activities (the second being reading to her, in Greek, Latin, you name it). They go on bike trips. Life is beautiful.
And then, she drops him. Not an unusual turn of events, except that she next enters his life when he's in law school and the students are made to attend a war-crimes trial of Auschwitz guards. (This is a "Holocaust-themed" movie with no flashbacks, just testimony).
This is where I do a 180-turn away from spoiler country.
Fiennes' part in all this is the least rewarding.
Basically, he's playing human wreckage, albeit well-paid professional wreckage. It is his job to make amends and reconcile his past -- making for a rather mopey last act, ironic in a movie that begins with a climax.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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