Amanda and I saw The Reader in a theatre the other night. Being parents of young children and Netflix customers, we don't "go to the movies" very often--the movies come to us--so I am not accustomed to marking the reaction of the crowd when the credits begin to roll. Silence and immobility, in this case.
Well, the holocaust is a big topic, and it may appear a sign of coarseness just to grab your coat and stroll out of there--like maybe, given means and opportunity, you could have been one of the perpetrators, such is your nonchalance regarding Grave Matters. Hannah, played by Kate Winslet, is a perpetrator. Not at the top, or anywhere near it, but a small cog in the machinery of death, one of the ordinary Germans guilty of great crimes. Uneducated, she needed a job, the SS was hiring, & etc. It's not only because her name is Hannah that the phrase, "banality of evil," comes to mind.
The Reader, unlike 2002's The Pianist and other "holocaust films" I've seen, does not rely for its wallop on depicting scenes of horror, degradation, and inhumanity. Though the present time of the movie spans close to 40 years, we are shown nothing that happened before 1958, when Hannah, then 36, has an affair with a 15-year-old, Michael Berg, played by David Kross. Eight years later Michael is stunned when, attending a trial as part of a law school seminar, he hears Hannah's name announced as a defendant in a mass-murder case from the Nazi period. If she could do it, what about him? And, we may think as we sit there, what about us?
Director Stephen Daldry wants us to consider the psychology of the grown-up Michael Berg, played by Ralph Fiennes, considering the psychology of Hannah, who at her trial deliberately suppresses evidence favorable to her cause by failing to disclose that, being illiterate, she could not have written an incriminating report that is entered into evidence. It seems she is less humiliated by her murders than by her inability to read or write. Michael debates with himself whether to approach the court with this mitigating evidence, in the end keeps it to himself, and then, perhaps because Fiennes is good at it, mopes around in a state of numb moral bewilderment for the next thirty years. It's at least arguably annoying that you have to guess at what he's thinking as he stares with wistful blankness across rooms and through windows, but Winslet may finally win an Oscar, and the movie is somewhat above average.
By the way, what is the point of adopting a German accent when portraying, in English, Germans speaking German? Would Iowa English offend against verisimilitude in a way that accented English does not?
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