Films dealing with the Holocaust are somewhat impervious to criticism — it’s a tragedy still raw and painful in our cultural consciousness. It’s also extremely limiting for directors, who wouldn’t dare risk denigrating its history. The Reader is one of the better films dealing with the Holocaust, as it trades a descent into visceral horrors for a considered inquiry into the nature of guilt.
The Reader is based on Bernhard Schlink’s novel, an Oprah’s Book Club selection from a few years back. The novel is devastatingly sad, aided by Schlink’s spare and direct prose. Although it tumbles towards the end (with a seemingly endless series of stalled endings), the film manages to maintain much of the novel’s power, adding rich period visuals and a slate of uniformly great performances.
Michael (David Kross) is 15 years old, living in a German town in the late ’50s. On his way to school one day, he’s overtaken by a fit of vomiting outside Hannah’s (Kate Winslet) apartment. She pities him, cleans him up and takes him home. He returns to visit her later and offer his thanks, and the two quickly tumble into bed. Although she’s more than twice his age, Hannah takes to the boy, and the two develop a routine — he visits her after school, and before they have sex, he reads to her. She refuses to talk about herself or her past, and after a short summer of fun ’n’ fucking, mysteriously disappears.
A few years later, while in law school, Michael and a few fellow students attend a war crimes trial, where he is confronted with Hannah’s past. The horror of the Holocaust and her secret begins to infect him, and we see in scenes that bookend the film (with Ralph Fiennes as Michael) how much his brief affair with her has haunted his adult life.
Though it is a love story of sorts, the film focuses more on the legacy of German guilt surrounding the Holocaust, and what philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as “the banality of evil” — how seemingly ordinary, innocuous people can be made to do great evil under the auspices of work and duty. At one point, Michael’s law professor tells him that while we like to think that society operates based on morality, it’s truly governed by law. And the mystery is: how did so many people not make the choice to do something different?
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