Movie Review: The Reader

I’ve struggled with writing this review. It is getting late on a Saturday evening. I’ve mulled over this review for the last few days. In fact, I was going to post this review before my review of Taken, but I was just finding it too hard to write this up. Before reading onwards, here are two caveats. I’m just going to post this today no matter what and post it before I head off to hang with friends on a Saturday night. Some of my thoughts are all over the place so be kind. Second, some of my memory recall of events might be slightly off, sorry.

The Reader. I wanted to catch this movie before the Oscars. I’d read articles that argued this was the least expected best picture nomination and perhaps the least deserving – stealing away a possible nomination from Dark Knight or Doubt. Here’s my initial opinion on the movie. The first half of this movie is a bit boring. I guess if you’ve seen the movie or heard about it you might find this a stunning statement -- Kate Winslet constantly in the nude, having hot sex. Sorry, I just wasn’t into it. I suppose the whole point with the nudity is to have you think about the soul of the two characters. Where the movie picks up is during the Nazi guard trial. It brought up a lot of thought provoking issues. In my opinion, this isn’t a movie nominated because of its storytelling (which I don’t think is all that great), but because it makes you think about complex issues.

Warning: there is a major spoiler revealed here. The stunning spoiler, and this is something I didn’t pick up on until the movie neared its end, is that Hanna (Kate Winslet) is illiterate. Why is this important? She volunteered as a Nazi guard, because she was illiterate. She worked at a factory during the war and was about to get a promotion. Due to the shame she felt regarding her illiteracy, she immediately volunteers as a Nazi guard to avoid revealing this shame. As a Nazi guard, one of her main functions was to select ten individuals at a time and send them off to Auschwitz. Another crime of hers was being present during a horrific event where 300 Jews remained locked in a burning church. She lived an uneventful life as a metro toll collector after the war. It is during this time that she meets Michael (David Kross). What follows is a love affair. She suddenly disappears (once again driven by a promotion that would expose her illiteracy). Years later, she is arrested and this is where Hanna and Michael once again cross paths. Unknown to Hanna, Michael is now in law school and is taking a class where part of the classroom is spent at the trial.

During the trial, I felt that Hanna wasn’t fully apologetic, but she was the most honest of the guards. She admitted that she was a Nazi guard while her fellow guards initially denied it. She did not deny her role in the deaths of 300 Jews in a church. Instead, she asks the judge what other options were available to her. In her opinion, if she opened the door, the Jews would have escaped meaning that she would have faced punishment.

Her honesty causes her fellow guards to conspire against her. She is accused in the trail as being the leader. The judge points to a document that describes the church fire, asking which of the guards wrote it. He believes it is Hanna. Hanna can prove that she wasn’t the leader by saying she is illiterate. Instead, due to her shame, she simply can’t admit this and therefore admits by default that she was in fact the leader. Now Michael could have done something here. He could have spoken to the judge, telling the judge that Hanna is in fact illiterate. He couldn’t do this, because he was ashamed to admit that he had an affair with a Nazi guard. The result of this fact being hidden is that Hanna is given a life sentence while the other guards are given a sentence of around four years.

Eventually, Michael re-establishes contact with Hanna via book recordings. He reads books to Hanna. Hanna eventually uses these recordings to read and write.

I don’t know if by reading the above, immediate moral/ethical questions start popping into your mind. You might feel sympathy for Hanna or you may not. You may also wonder about Michael: how could he allow someone to spend a lifetime in prison when the real sentence should be only four years? Two movie critics had vastly different takes on the movie. Ron Rosenbaum on Slate.com attacks this movie as being a “film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.” Roger Ebert (FYI: I think there might be a link issue on Ebert's website, which hopefully gets fixed) on the other end argues that this is a movie about shame and, “’The Reader’ suggests that many people are like Michael and Hanna, and possess secrets that we would do shameful things to conceal.”

What follows are a couple questions I had (I had many more, but will only address two of them – you can read the two articles by Rosenbaum and Ebert for other questions):

Here’s one question that popped into my head while driving home from the movie theatre: Are there degrees of guilt? She obviously wasn’t the leader of the guards. She obviously found herself in this job by error. And yet she still participated in it. Do I feel sympathy for the fact that she was sentenced too harshly? Yes. Do I feel sympathy for the fact that she got entangled with Nazi crimes? No. She could have taken a stance – and by stance I don’t mean trying to free the Jews (that takes immense amounts of courage), but she could have left her job as a guard. But then you also have to ask yourself: If placed into that situation, would I have had the courage to leave? I think it is initially easy to say yes. But then am I really morally better than Nazi Germans or those who participated in recent genocides in Iraq, Darfur or Rwanda? In the right circumstances, could any of us find ourselves doing horrible acts?

Another question that popped into my head was the issue of forgiveness. After committing suicide Hanna states that she’s left money for the daughter of the survivor who testified against her. Though I have to admit that I don’t think Hanna was apologetic during the trail or even at the time of her death for her role as a guard, I think this last act is her attempt to apologize for her crimes. I don’t know if that makes much sense. Hanna doesn’t apologize for doing the job that was assigned to her. She is a person who believes in doing a job to the best of her abilities. I think she is apologizing for being a murderer. The daughter has no forgiveness for her. Michael (Ralph Fiennes), who delivers the money to the daughter, explains that Hanna was illiterate. The daughter responds with something as follows, “Does this money excuse her for what she did?” Michael doesn’t go a step further, which is to explain that Hanna was sentenced unfairly (this brings up the issue of sympathy again). Even though the daughter doesn’t understand what Michael attempted to say, her statement still has a point. Does it matter that Hanna was only a follower versus a leader? Should the fact that Hanna was just following orders mean that the daughter should extend some level of forgiveness? I think the answer is that the daughter should have extended forgiveness. And perhaps the daughter did extend forgiveness via her actions. Her words indicated no forgiveness, but her actions did via the fact that she put the tin can that held the money in a visible location. In some ways, the last moments of this film reminded me of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Forgiving is an important process in healing.