Ready for the Reader

The Reader (2008), dir. Stephen Daldry, with Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross.  Saw in the movie house.

In 1958/1959, a high school junior in Neustadt falls ill and is helped by a woman.  Over the course of time, they enter into a relationship.  More than anything else, the woman likes to hear the young man read to her from the classics of literature.  As the summer of ‘59 ends, the woman moves away and the relationship ends.  The young man does not see the woman again until, as a law student in 1968, he sees that the woman is on trial for acts committed when she was an SS guard at Auschwitz during WWII. 

The film does a remarkable job (as does the book on which it is based) of presenting someone who has done terrible things in a somewhat sympathetic light.  We come to know the woman, as the boy does, before we learn about her past, and, like the boy, we are shocked. 

The theme of secrecy is emphasized throughout — the boy’s teacher claims that it is a recurrent theme in Western literature, and cites the Odyssey as a prime example.  Of course, that’s one of the woman’s favorite books.  The woman herself is keeping a secret, and over the course of the movie, the  young man has secrets he keeps as well.  As befits a film called The Reader, the emphasis on literature as a secret world open to those who read (or who are read to) is also a large part of the story.

Kate Winslet does a remarkable job playing the woman, making her sympathetic, but not wholly so.  We can feel sorry for her, though we cannot accept what she had done. 

A truly excellent film.