“The Reader” opens with a man looking out a window. The year is 1995. The city, Berlin. Played by Ralph Fiennes, he looks pained and pensive. As the action shifts to the late ’50s and to a much younger version of the man, we learn why.
Director Stephen Daldry knows his way around and through evocative books.
In 2002, he did a beautiful job with Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours.” (It is terrific news that he is directing “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of American Jews and comic-book heroes.)
Based on German author Bernhard Schlink’s best seller, “The Reader” is a formally simpler, yet ethically more perilous affair. After all, it tells a story of the Holocaust and its aftermath in one of the most intimate ways possible.
What Daldry achieves with “The Reader” is a stunning, hushed victory.
Kate Winslet and German actor David Kross (making an exceptional English-language debut) star as Hanna Schmitz and the young Micheal Berg.
When Hanna meets Michael there is little reason to imagine the two will become lovers. He has escaped a train. Head swimming, stomach in upheaval, the sky pouring. He finds an apartment entryway, where he throws up. A woman grabs the 15-year-old, cleans him roughly, fills pails with water and douses the stone entryway and then the boy’s shoes. It is the opposite of romantic comedy’s rule to meet cute.
Brought up in a civil, learned household, once he is well enough, the boy is sent to thank the stranger. Their encounter is life-changing.
Their lovemaking scenes are lovely but frank. Their nakedness is pronounced in ways that force audiences to ponder nudity’s symbolic weight.
Their ravenous desire takes a turn when Michael begins reading to Hanna.
Winslet is entrancing as Hanna. Her beauty — harsh, a bit defiant, or is that defended? — will indict audiences later. Like Michael, our interest — fondness even — for her may cause us guilt.
Michael is sensitive, tentative, but he is not a child. Kross’ performance helps tamp somewhat our discomfort with their ages. Hanna is 21 years older.
Scenes with Fiennes frame and punctuate a tale that is a coming of age not just of an adolescent boy but of the second generation of Germans confronting the dark patrimony of the Holocaust.
“The Reader” captures the intimate and the epic. Using Hanna and Michael’s complex intimacy, the movie wrestles with the weight of national guilt.
Eros and Thanatos get searing close-ups. Michael learns the personal cannot dodge the historical when, as a law student, he attends a war crimes trial in which Hanna is a defendant. She disappeared from his life ages ago.
What could be more soul-rattling than learning that your first love — the one that defined your relationship to sexual intimacy — was an SS guard at a concentration camp?
It is a fact that Hanna doesn’t deny. It is a fact that alters their past and their future.
The trial’s outcome leads us into a third act that continues to give renewed, rending meaning to the movie’s title.
David Hare’s adaptation is spare and eloquent. He gently omits scenes that were lovely to read. They illuminated, but they would have crowded the movie with more characters when Michael and Hanna are enough.
Well, perhaps not quite enough.
Bruno Ganz plays the law professor whose students attend the trial. When Michael realizes something about Hanna that might help her defense, he takes his quandary to Professor Rohl.
A mother and daughter were the only Jewish survivors of the “death march” and the ensuing conflagration that are the subject of the trial.
Lena Olin portrays the mother in the courtroom scenes. Later she does incisive work as the daughter, an author of the survivor memoir.
She receives Michael in her New York apartment. Their exchange is not the movie’s last scene.
It is, however, a fitting reminder of how the story — hers and her mother’s, Michael and Hanna’s — never stops revealing its jarring meanings, its countless sorrows.
“The Reader”
R for some scenes of sexuality and nudity. 2 hour, 3 minutes. Directed by Stephen Daldry; written by David Hare; from the book by Bernhard Schlink; photography Chris Menges and Roger Deakins; starring Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes, Bruno Ganz, Leno Olin. Opens today at the Chez Artiste.
