a less talked about “The Reader”
iView Author: ahmad raza (Allahabad, India) Email: raza000 [at] gmail [dot] com
a less talked about “The Reader”
We have been talking about the Revolutionary Roads, Benjamin Buttons, Sam Mendes, Slumdog Millionaire (we talked so much that we killed it), Danny Boyle, Amitabh Bachchan, waghaira waghaira. I was disappointed when I didn’t find even half of the few of us discussing The Reader (its up with all the buttons and millionaires on your Academy of Motion Pictures).
The Readeris a movie by Stephen Daldry based on a novel by Bernhard Shlink, a German writer. It is about the inability of successive German generations to comprehend with the holocaust. How could their fathers sit through what can be called “the worst condition in which a human being can be kept”? Shlink was basically a detective novelist which can be seen at the pace at which the movie progresses. It is the perfect pace at which a movie should reveal itself, moving inch by inch. It can be divided into three segments.
The first segment is about Michael’s discovery of intimacy with the opposite sex on a larger scale as a fifteen year old. It’s about his affair with a mysterious woman called Hannah, who is twice her age, and as an adolescent, for him Hannah’s complexities take a backseat when compared to the new experiences and pleasures that he derive from being with her.
In the second part, Michael is a student of the law at a university and witnesses court cases as part of his vocational training. On one such case Hannah is one of the defendants in a war-crime trial being committed by the Nazis. Michael is both, the guilty lover, since he loved a criminal and a confused young man since he cannot understand as to why she is accepting full responsibility of a crime that couldn’t have been committed by her alone (the other defendants accuse Hannah of writing the report since she was in charge but she couldn’t have because she was illiterate).
The third segment is the part in which Michael tries to understand Hannah (because he was her lover) as well as condemns her (because he was a war-hating German) for her acts and finds out that it is impossible to do both. It’s a tussle and he goes to which side is unclear in the movie.
The first segment belongs to David Kross. He essays the role of young Michael with so much subtlety that any seasoned actor should take a bow. Not in a single frame does he feels intimidated by Kate and has answers for all her nuances.
The second segment is all Kate Winslet, even though she doesn’t has much screen time but she sends you through a tailspin in those court room scenes and you reel for a long time. A special mention for the scene in which Michael visits one of the concentration camps to incline more towards Hannah but comes out as one who finds it even hard to justify. It’s a heart wrenching scene and I was moved to tears would be an understatement.
The third segment is Ralf Fiennes playing the divorced father of a daughter, a grown up Michael whose every relationship has been affected because of his alliance with Hannah.
He never meets her out of acrimony but sends her recorded tapes of books so that she has something to hang on to in her imprisonment for life.
The movie talks about how a war not only affects the physical but the metaphysical aspect of a complete society impairing it genetically. A catastrophe of this magnitude shatters a person so much that it is impossible to grow out of it.
The only aspect the movie is unable to touch is Hannah’s PoV. I’m still trying to figure her out. Whether it was her inability to read and write that did her or the indifference towards the crime that she committed, if there was any indifference.
The narrative is very engaging and Stephen Daldry has been able to explain an idea with the help of some extraordinary performances. When Michael hears Hannah’s voice in the courtroom and the camera slides slowly from his face towards her posture, I started having goose bumps. Daldry has done an insurmountable task of depicting on film the whole resonance in people’s lives in Germany after the holocaust and I can overlook the flaws in the movie due to the treatment of his vision.
I haven’t seen Frost/Nixon and Milk but this movie is definitely better than both, Benjamin Button and Slumdog.
Tags: Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader Movie Review
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Whew a relief from the overdose of SDM, LBC we had been having of late. Have not seen the movie to date, but i generally do like Kate Winslet, and the theme seems interesting. Will check it out on DVD if available. I generally like watching these Holocaust movies.
Neat write-up. Loved this movie and also “Revolutionary Road”. Kate is simply brilliant in both movies. Agree that, reader is bettern than Button and SDM..WARNING SPOILERS BELOW
Hannah’s PoV:
I think Hannah is always been alone and has cold attitude towards life. When she starts an affair with Michael, she is using him to kill her loneliness and the bonus is he reads to her. I would have loved to see more court-room drama as to why Hannah din’t open the church gate. There is simply no sympathy angle to her, because of her crime (may be the novel should reveal more of Hannah). As she says, she was just doing her duty and nothing more. She is always been in misery, insecure and too proud of herself in not admiting to her being illitrate. So she suffers, from start to end. Towards the end, when Michael asks her what she did learn from the past, she answers that she learnt to read. It seems that her real love was towards reading..than anything else.
Hannah is a complex character, I do beleive that she fall for Michael when she spends time in jail, learning to read and write. Her act of suicidal at the end, is becuase she realizes that Michael resents her now, somehow he has become “cold” as she was in the begining and that she is the root cause….
i don’t agree that Michael becomes cold in the end!!he remains in dilemma right from the moment he sees her in the courtroom up till he visits the writer of the incident in the end!!she was an unconscious Nazi and somehow i pity her!!
Nice review. Kate Winslet IS Hanna Schmitz!
i couldn’t imagine anybody else portraying Hanna’s complex yet subdued character. Kross’s Michael, as a sexuality-discovering teenager to confused yet angered young barrister is just amazing… Guess, Ralph’s adult Michael carries a single expression thought out, is just okay.
am not surprised if Kate wins an Oscar for being Hanna!
Totally agree on Michael’s dilemma, but he is maintaining a distant from Hannah, but also at the same time he is kind (offering the help). It was tragic to see how Hannah changed the “Kid’s” life..I have mixed feelings towards her..But I don’t understand how he made peace with her at the end..did he accept Hannah as she is? It would have been interesting to see how he narrates the story to her daughter..
I believe what Hanna sees as life is a less complex life of an illiterate. That is why her carnal love is so pure as well as her role as a nazi executioner. the transform in Hanna comes much later when she learnt to ‘read’(O man what a scene that is). But for the first segment of reader Hanna with all her physical, animal like innocence remains as the ultimate passive lover of life movie world has ever shown.