Review: The Reader
The Reader
Director: Stephen Daldry
Released: January 9, 2009
**** 4/5
What I probably like best about The Reader is just how much of an anti-Holocaust “Holocaust movie” it is. Most concerned with the generation that came after and had to live in the shadow of Nazi Germany, it tackles not the atrocity of the camps (which, let’s face it, has been done, and done) but rather everything that surrounded them, the group mentality and total incomprehensibility of them. Its strength, though–its enormous scope–actually also serves as its weakness. Strings tangle, come together then release, creating a final product that feels as brilliant as it does incomplete.
Incredibly shot and so well acted, what the film explores is this idea of greyness, our inability but constant attempt to understand the past and whether there is, in fact, anything to learn from it in the first place. Nothing is easy or typical, and that’s great. But where it seems like Daldry goes soft is by giving us an ending rather than an open question, an almost tidy, if not entirely hopeful, resolution. It’s the idea of literacy, that Winslet’s character Hannah could change, could learn something, her money going to Jewish literacy foundations after she dies, creating something good, however small, out of so much bad. It’s not absolution, as one survivor reminds us, but don’t be fooled, it kind of is.
But I honestly don’t believe that The Reader or Stephen Daldry is in the business of absolving Nazis, only asking questions, commenting on how ridiculously complicated life is. If you love someone and they do something awful, what happens to the love? Can good things ever come from bad ones, or does it only matter that we never stop looking for them? And the biggest and most impossible question of all, of course: how can something like this happen?
I admit, I wish Hannah’s crimes were shown to us. To only reference them seems cheap and easy. But if they were the movie’s major theme might be lost. We would be incapable of having any kind of sympathy for her. The complication would be gone, grey to black, the same as when Michael gets his first letter back after weeks of sending tapes to her in jail. He does it for himself, because he still loves her, her memory and abstraction. But when she responds, his illusions are broken. She becomes real. And he stops sending.
What do we do with all of this confusion and how does it define us? That, I think, is the major question of the film. But at its heart there’s a longing for the simplicity of the very first sentence of Hannah’s favorite book, The Lady with the Little Dog. There are no cruel or grey undertones there, nothing tragic or doomed. There’s only an observation of a woman, one that could be happy or hopeful, one that could be anyone: “It was said that a new face had appeared on the promenade: a lady with a little dog.”
What do you think? There’s so much going on here, you really can’t even say the movie is “about” any one thing. And maybe that’s why, despite my complaints, I like it so much. But I want to hear another take. I still haven’t ruled out the possibility that Daldry just let Hannah off the hook and distracted us with sentimentality. Am I crazy? This movie has me running in circles.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 4:00 pm and is filed under film, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Mike August 23rd, 2009 at 12:53 am
I like your take. She's a part of his history, she'll always be there. Definitely. But still, her suicide at the end, Fiennes finally opening up to his daughter, Hannah's money going to a good cause, her learning to read–it just all adds up to something a bit too tidy for me. Well, maybe even not necessarily too tidy, but at least just not sloppy enough. The movie asks SO many questions and I love it for that. But I was left wanting that same open-endedness about the actual ending of the movie. Just because people Don't always learn things, there isn't Always change. Sometimes you just have to deal with the fact that something is what it is, no matter how terrible. And there's something to learn in that, too.