Hollywood's obsession with the Second World War and the Nazi's continues with The Reader, based on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink, it was released in 2008 and went on to give Kate Winslet an Oscar for her performance as Schmitz. Considering it was the same year she was nominated for Revolutionary Road, I'm shocked she was even considered for this but then the Academy loves this type of movie which is why so many get churned out at the end of each year.
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| Michael Berg (David Kross) and Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) |
I was initially underwhelmed by Winslet's performance, as an Oscar winner I was expecting a real powerhouse acting display that veritably failed to appear. That's not to say she is bad but certainly not worthy of the award, especially compared to her other performance referenced above, whilst Kross is also capable in the role of the young naive Michael and Ralph Fiennes is decent in the small role he undertakes as the older Michael Berg. The best performer is Bruno Ganz as Berg's lecturer at a seminar on the Holocaust, his character was a survivor from this period.
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| Kate Winslet as an old Hanna Schmitz |
The opening act which involves the 'happier' times of Berg and Schmitz's relationship is rather dull and uninteresting which says a lot for a period with a lot of sex and nudity in it. This act feels long and needlessly overdrawn whilst the middle act seems to be squeezed into such a short time frame, the emphasis was placed far too deeply on the love story between the pair early on and in the final act rather than the haunting material available in the second act. The book is believed to have some incredibly harrowing yet engrossing material that was completely ignored in the movie and this has to be a mistake.
But the deeper issue I take with the movie is the story itself, the film is expecting us to believe the social stigma of being illiterate is worse to admit to than being the person who ordered 300 Jews to be killed during the Second World War. Also the fact it expects us to feel sympathetic towards Schmitz for the fact she couldn't read is one of the most manipulative and morally questionable things I have seen in cinema. You don't need reading skills to save those people or to know that was being done was incredibly evil. There is also the matter of her seducing a 15 year old boy that is conveniently glossed over but this is an aside to how much hatred the plot conjured up inside me at how it was treating the subject matter at hand.
1/4 Misguided and deceptively manipulative
I don't think the movie's intention was to make us feel sorry for Hannah. It shows us who she is as a person (when she's with Michael), and what she did in the past (which is one of the most atrocious things I've ever heard). People's opinions on her character vary, but the film never attempts to manipulate us to feel one way or the other. People aren't black and white, there were various elements to Hannah as a person, and this movie was showing that she wasn't a complete monster, she's a human being and everybody makes mistakes. That doesn't condone what she's done, but it's trying to show us that there are good aspects and bad aspects to her. I think that's the beauty of this story, because none of us have walked in Hannah's shoes, we didn't live in the hateful and brainwashing time that she grew up in, and so we cannot be 100% sure that if we were in her position we would have done anything differently.
ReplyDeleteInteresting review, though I'd give this film 4/4 Stars :)