The Reader (2008) +

A fascinating account of the residual damage of one boy's erotic awakening. The story is at once intricate and simple, told in three distinct parts which interweave in roughly chronological order. In the "first" part, in a still reconstructing Germany, a comparatively privileged youth stumbles into a sexual affair with a working class woman, about two decades his senior. The affair appears mutually sustaining, even though the two share little but sex, baths and a love for literature (which the boy reads to the woman as a prelude to lovemaking). At the end of the summer, the woman mysteriously packs up her apartment and disappears, leaving the boy in the lurch of his first heartbreak. lmost a decade later, Michael is a young man studying law when a seminar he's taking obliges his attendance at a trial of six SS guards who worked at a workcamp that was a waystation for Auschwitz. Due to a recently published survivor memoir, these six women have been named as defendants in one of the nation's first trials of SS workers for murder. Michael is stunned to realize that one of the defendants is his former lover, Hanna. As the trial unfolds, Michael must confront the incomprehensibility of his own past as he contemplates the actions of regular Germans in the Nazi era. At the same time, his intimate connection with Hanna causes him to realize a key deception at the center of the trial and must decide whether or not to act on that knowledge, as well as decide whether or not to reconnect with Hanna. In the "third" part (which both frames and punctuates moments in the other two), we encounter Michael at two or three other points in his life, mostly as he very slowly comes to accept the ways in which his summer with Hanna has remained a defining feature of his selfhood, especially his in/ability to be fully emotionally honest with anyone else. The film culminates as Michael takes a set of actions which acknowledge the importance of his past as he also makes a transformative step toward a different future. This narrative, absorbing and complex as it is, is the least compelling feature of the film. Each narrative twist is fairly evident and there are few surprises. Whether this is the fault of the source material, or Stephen Daldry's meticulous direction, I'm not sure. However, despite the fact that I could see each twist well before it twisted, I remained somehow compelled by the filmmaking. Indeed, even though I didn't especially care about any of the characters in this piece, I nonetheless found myself utterly fascinated by them. The performances are uniformly strong. Kate Winslet -- portraying Hanna in all three story segments -- is brilliantly opaque. There's no knowing what she's thinking or feeling, but there's no looking away from her. Moreover, she nearly disappears into the role. It's a great Best Actress performance (unfortunately pitched as Best Supporting, which makes next to no sense). David Kross as the young Michael, both at 15 and 23, is thrilling. So callow, so German, so exuberant, so sexy. His is a heartwrenching performance of a prickly, distant adolescent character -- a character moving from innocence into the defining conflict of his soul. Ralph Fiennes is less compelling as the mature Michael (playing the character from his early 30s through to his early 50s), but he's solid nonetheless. Fiennes is left to play some of the most mysterious aspects of the story: a man living with the consequences of the actions of his young adulthood, as well as habits of intimacy cultivated even earlier. Basically, Fiennes is a man who has chosen to maintain the most intimate secret of his first love and it has stunted his ability to be emotionally open, to truly share his life with anyone. As a result, he's an emotional zombie, cut off from everything -- especially himself. Fiennes is haunting as this sad elder Michael and the quiet bloom he discovers as the picture proceeds is a subtle, sophisticated accomplishment. But most extraordinary, perhaps, is Lena Olin in one of the films few surprises -- in a double role, playing an elderly Auschwitz survivor in the "middle" section of the story as well as that survivor's daughter thirty years later. It's a stunty move, but it's thrilling that it works. Olin delivers a simple, throttling performance in both roles -- each woman as unwavering in her certitude as Michael/Hanna are equivocal. It's a startling, thrilling set of scenes -- certainly one of my favorite supporting actress moments of the year, tragically lost amidst the category consternation surrounding Winslet here and in Revolutionary Road. Also remarkable is Stephen Daldry's unapologetically beautiful filming of this despairing story: the cast is uniformly gorgeous; the decoration is spot-on; the ancillary characters are strikingly well-cast. (I especially thrilled at the casting of the five women who are Hanna's co-defendants at trial: five more hilariously yet horrifyingly apt visions of post-Nazi womanhood could likely not be found.) I remain uncertain about the narrative structuring the piece, and how Daldry maneuvers the fact that Hanna is "simpler" than Michael in his tendency to view the central relationship through a lens of "great love." However, I did truly admire the film's explication of the vestigial impact of adolescent experiences of love, betrayal, and intimacy. In many ways, Michael's story is one of a man finding a way to undo the damage done by his first experience of love, a trauma exacerbated by the incredible historical circumstances of his first lover's life. I'm impressed that Daldry used the age disparity between Winslet and Kross to amplify the exploitative aspects of their sexual relationship. Kross's frontal nudity and peachfuzzy skin never permits us to entirely forget that this is a teen's body and, concomitantly, that this woman (despite her lack of class and cultural privilege) does have a kind of power within this erotic transaction. Indeed, Daldry carefully, unobtrusively always maintains what could have easily been "The Summer of My Cougar Lover" the exploitative tensions within this erotic scenario, despite its many (apparently mutual) pleasures. As such, the film -- even more than the source material I suspect -- marks the peculiarly intimate damage done to Michael as a young boy/man arriving to emotional/sexual maturity through the vehicle of this relationship. As the film shows Michael parsing through this damage of this experience, the film is at its most compelling and gratifying. Yet, truth be told, I wasn't especially emotionally affected, even as I was consistently fascinated. A fascinating, artfully made film, loaded with impressive performances.