January 21, 2009: The Reader
It’s a good thing that I saw Revolutionary Road as the early show on this particular evening, and The Reader as the late show. I thought Revolutionary Road was decent, and better than I expected (in retrospect, I realize I wasn’t expecting much), but The Reader blew it out of the water. Mind you, this is not to say that The Reader was really so wonderful, but it was substantially better.
This is the story of a woman, Hanna Schmitz (played by Kate Winslet) who becomes involved with a teenaged boy in post-WWII Germany. When not exploring their passionate sexual relationship, she has him read to her while they lie in bed. He becomes obsessed with her and it’s clear that they are in love, but eventually she breaks off the relationship. Later on, during a law school outing to view a court case, he sees her on trial for Nazi war crimes. He struggles to reconcile the Hanna he knew with the Hanna heading towards jail time for going along with the Nazi atrocities during the war. We jump around among settings from the late 1950s through the mid-1990s, in what I assume as usual to be a production design nightmare, and eventually come to some appropriately awkward closure with Hanna and our now middle-aged protagonist in the more-or-less present day.
The Reader seems to have reviewed well in general, although I don’t find myself looking at any passionately positive reviews of it. This is a holocaust (survivor) movie, which is understood to be automatic awards bait, and indeed the film seems calculated in almost a spiteful way to garner those awards. Kate Winslet finally won her Oscar for this performance, a fitting turnabout to her half-joking claim during her guest appearance several years ago on the cable TV series Extras that doing a holocaust movie is the way to win the awards. Some time has now passed since I saw The Reader, and while I found it gripping on first viewing, I don’t feel that it would be as compelling a second time.
(New! I will be providing a 6-word quick summary of each film at the very end of each review.)
Middling holocaust awards fodder, won awards.
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