The Reader is a good film, up there with Revolutionary Road. After a brief respite in the latter, Kate Winslet is back doing what she does best in the former, taking her kit off.
The first half of the film is one long sex scene, with Kate and the German kid doing it in all sorts of positions, some of which were new to me. Some might call it pornographic, but Kate has more the body of an artist's model than a porn star, and I for one find it difficult to get turned on by her small, dark aureolae topped off by none too becoming nipples. All on a foundation of rather saggy breasts.
Having got that out of the way, artistically the sex is necessary, though whether quite so much, and so many and diverse positions, are necessary, I'm not so sure. I was lucky inasmuch as I knew virtually nothing of the film before I saw it courtesy of Cathay Pacific on the small screen. Those of you who haven't seen it yet and would like to remain in the same position I was in might like to stop reading now.
Essentially, The Reader is a very simple film. Boy meets older woman, does it in lots of positions and fulfills what appears to be a foreplay fetish (or sometimes, if they're too hot to wait, an afterplay fetish) by reading aloud to her from various books. Fast forward eight years or so and the kid is about to qualify as a lawyer. Imagine his shock when he turns up at a Nazi trial and one of the accused is his ex lover. She was a concentration camp guard, who, upon the evacuation of the camps in the winter of 1944-45, was charged with leading the Jewish wraiths on a death march round the countryside while trying to avoid the Russians. Overnighting in a village, the guards – there are five in total – lock their prisoners in a church, which then burns down, killing everyone inside bar one.
In typical Nazi bureaucratic style, a report is filed for Berlin, in which the incident is faithfully recorded, thus condemning the writer to life behind bars. But who wrote it? The other four say it was our Kate, and when she steps onto the stand she agrees with them. The catch is that our German knows she couldn't have written it because she's illiterate. Hence all that reading. His dilemma is whether to intervene and save her, thus wrecking his career, or to say and do nothing. He decides to do nothing.
What the film shows well is Kate's transition from shame at her illiteracy to guilt at her involvement in mass murder. What it doesn't handle so well (or maybe the point is that there's nothing clear cut to handle and it must remain true to its subject matter) is the German's feelings and motives. Yes, he can't hold down a relationship, but I wanted to know why he didn't feel a complete bastard. He appears to salve his conscience by reading aloud onto tape a prodigious number of books and sending them to her in prison, whereby she finally learns to read and write.
My ambivalence about the German was exacerbated by the fact that, when he reaches early middle age and becomes Ralph Fiennes, he sounds like a man doing a Bruno impression. By the time he's aged a bit and visits Kate in jail, he sounds like a man doing a Ralph Fiennes impression. Is the director trying to show us how successful he has become as a lawyer by causing him to lose his German accent?
Finally, the time comes for Kate to be released. As we have come to expect from prison-based dramas from Porridge to The Shawshank Redemption, she is suffering from the effects of institutionalisation and clearly will have difficulties readjusting to normal life. But – and this is where the film is at its strongest – her real problem is not institutionalisation but the fact that she has nothing left to live for. She has learned to read and write, and she has no wish to confront other people and their demons when she has spent long years confronting her own. And so she kills herself, and it somehow seems right.
