The Reader

I just treated myself to a couple of big batches of (yes, of course, pirated) DVD purchases to see me through a planned month (or two) of liver recovery and careful spending. It included most of the winners and contenders in the recent Academy Awards, and a fair range of other stuff too.

Unfortunately, I decided to kick off with The Reader. (Well, no, I decided to kick off with the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, but that is just so awful it doesn't even merit comment. I feel soiled. I feel obliged to rush out immediately and buy the original version by way of karmic recompense.)

What a steaming pile! Prettily photographed and well-acted, yes, but what on earth is the point of it? I will follow the conventional etiquette of issuing a SPOILER alert, although I don't think there is very much in this film to spoil.

I suspect the source novel by Bernhard Schlink may be much better. There is often this problem in adapting very 'literary' novels for the screen. It's not to say that David Hare did a bad job of the screenplay as such; just that the contrivances of the plot are rather more rudely exposed on screen. In a novel, we can suspend disbelief rather further, particularly if we're being carried along by the ideas, and by the quality of the writing. Well, it's not really 'disbelief' that needs to be suspended as such, since this is not a wholly implausible story, though a somewhat improbable one; rather, it's a suspension of the demands we more usually make upon a narrative - focus, pacing, characterization, unity, that kind of thing. Writers today take far more liberties with this kind of thing, and we often allow them to get away with it, if their writing has other compensatory qualities. I rather think Schlink's novel may be such a book.

The Reader is not one story, but three: it's an erotic memoir of first love, a courtroom drama about a war crimes trial, and a prison story about a convict learning to read and write while behind bars. Each of these three elements is fine as far as it goes, but they don't blend convincingly together. (And, OK, yes, the main segment about the initial love story does make for somewhat uncomfortable viewing: David Kross's character, though he looks older, is supposed to be still only 15, but having a torrid sexual affair with a woman more than 20 years older than him. The only occasion on which any reference is made to any possible impropriety in this is when an innkeeper who's just served the couple lunch mistakes the woman for his mother. But for that one brief moment of discomfort, the arrangement is treated as perfectly normal, it is not questioned at all.)

The Holocaust theme seems to be grafted on rather arbitrarily to heighten interest; but that section of the film is dealt with somewhat perfunctorily. And the key plot device here is, well, yes, wildly implausible. Young Michael's subsequent visit to a concentration camp (which he is able to tour entirely alone; and without registering any reaction whatsoever) had me in tears, as any close-up contact with the Holocaust will do; but that left me feeling manipulated. The scene didn't seem to serve any purpose other than to inject some emotional impact that the rest of the story lacked.

The most frustrating thing about this story is the utter lack of any characterization: we never get to know the two main characters or understand their motivations; thus we never get to care about them. You can't expect people to sit through a 2-hour film with such a complete absence of emotional engagement with the protagonists.

I couldn't help recalling that when Kate Winslet made a very funny, self-mocking cameo appearance a few years ago in Ricky Gervais' Extras series, she joked that Holocaust roles were Oscar gold; that shaft of satire has proved prophetic for her (although I suppose this role was at least untypical to the extent that she was a guard rather than a victim). Yep, she was ticking all the 'Oscar' boxes with this one: willing to be naked, willing to be 'old' (lots of make-up in the later scenes), and willing to play a mentally compromised character (highly neurotic, and perhaps somewhat educationally subnormal - not going "full retard", but going plenty far enough in the context of, oh my god, a Holocaust movie!). It was a performance of some range and subtlety, but I've preferred her in many other things. I imagine it was the sense of 'worthiness' attaching to the project rather than the performance itself which won over the Academy voters here.

The one thing that almost redeemed this leaden fable about the power of love and reading was the final scene between Ralph Fiennes (the lover, in middle age) and Lena Olin (the camp survivor). Everything in the film up to that point had been trite and unsubstantial, I found; but that scene (I could well imagine it being David Hare's own invention, inserted as a kind of protest against the dross he'd been having to deal with in the rest of the film) was unexpected and electrifying: the victim refusing to be conciliatory, refusing to give any easy absolution, challenging Fiennes (and his former lover) as to what on earth they thought to achieve by approaching her in this way - it seemed almost to represent the everyman response of the poor viewer, mystified as to what had been the intended point of the whole story.

I'd watch that scene again. I'd almost recommend buying the film just to watch that scene; but I don't suppose it would have the same impact unless you'd first been baffled, bored, irritated and appalled by the 115 minutes that precede it.