The Reader
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Big Magilla
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Now, I havent seen the movie and I even have a feeling that I won't like it much but... (and I know I will get the insults now) this is the proof that (some) Americans are stupid. SO stupid.Sabin wrote:Thelma Adams takes issue with 'The Reader' in the Huffington post. I think the answer is simple: men are dogs, women become them. It's as simple as that.
READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE READER: WHEN IS ABUSE NOT ABUSE?
The Reader? It's goodish. And Kate Winslet is, as ever, brilliant. And it has Nazis, which elevates it on the Oscar nom scale. But I'm not critiquing it here. I'm addressing its portrayal of child abuse - an adult having sex with a minor. I'm curious about the pass the disturbingly intimate relationship between a mature woman and an adolescent boy seems to be getting in David Hare's adaptation of Bernard Schlink's novel, as directed by Stephen Daldry. Pivotal to the romantic tragedy is the passionate post-war affair between a 36.year-old female German tram conductor Hanna (Winslet) and a dewy 15-year-old virgin Michael (David Kross). During their multiple, wonderfully lit, detailed erotic scenes, we see plenty of bare gorgeous Winslet indoctrinating the equally nude boy into the ways of slow sex that please a woman, and leave a man satisfied as well. Trust me: they both look very yummy - or judge for your self. View the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2319450137/
But, reverse the genders and consider a parallel, made up example. Imagine an intellectual period drama (perhaps they quote Chekhov and Homer, too) in which Hugh Jackman, 39, and Miley Cyrus, 16, play characters that have explicit sex. OK, so maybe there's an underlying awful secret -- he participated in aboriginal genocide, or ratted out Reds in Hollywood, or upheld apartheid in South Africa but... while the camera rolls, the focus of the scenes is the sex and intimacy that occurs in bed and bathtub, between two beautiful bodies, one experienced and dominant, the other ripely pubescent. Reverse the genders - older man deflowers underage girl - and there would be a public outcry. Look no further than Miley's scandalous Vanity Fair/Annie Liebowitz bare back photo and multiply it times ten. Is there any doubt that, even if the younger partner "consents," this is statutory rape because she's a minor and, by definition, under the age of consent?
What's interesting is the blatant double-standard in Western cultures when it comes to the relations between an adult and a minor - when the pair happens to be an older woman, younger male. When I wrote about the treatment of women teachers hitting on their pubescent male students - aka Clearasil Cougars - like Mary Kay Letourneau in the November issue of Marie Claire http://www.marieclaire.com/world/news/teachers-sex-with-students-rape, I wondered whether these hook-ups are any different from male teachers molesting female students? What I discovered is that our society often treats the victims as lucky boys being eased through a tricky rite of passage. It's the Mrs. Robinson, Summer of 42 syndrome. Fifty years ago, small-town grandpas took their pimply grandsons to a local prostitute to lose their virginity. And, in The Reader, mother-aged Hanna saves Michael from the unbearable awkwardness of unhooking some same-age Gretel's bra. Our society actually, leniently views "consensual" sex between older women and teenage boys, like marijuana smoking or underage drinking. Male judges -and Hollywood execs -- give it a wink and a pass (right on, junior!).
Ultimately what's curiously disturbing about The Reader has little to do with Nazis. As Michael grows up and Ralph Fiennes replaces David Kross in the role, the adult suffers from the kind of failure at mature sexual and intimate relationships - with his wife, daughter, and mother - that often typifies abuse victims. He's distant and at least his daughter believes the culpability is hers; he doesn't love her because of who she is, not his adolescent secret. When we first see the adult Michael, he's having an affair of the bed - but clearly not of the heart - with a gorgeous woman nearly young enough to be his daughter. And, as the mistress complains that Michael won't let her in to his life, he clearly can't wait until she leaves his apartment so that he can be alone with himself and his memories. It's textbook abused behavior - and all the movie's ambiguities about Nazis, hidden secrets, and admitting culpability don't fully address the fact that Michael is both the victim of abuse, and lost in his continued love for his abuser, because nothing since has come close to that intensity. Emotionally, he stopped growing at 15.
Michael is a victim of abuse, and his abuser just happened to have been a luscious retired Auschwitz guard. You can call their tryst and its consequences a metaphor of two generations of Germans passing guilt from one to the next, but that doesn't explain why filmmakers Daldry and Hare luxuriated in the sex scenes -- and why it's so tastefully done audiences won't see it for the child pornography it is.
Literature - and cuture, western culture even - doesnt start with 1492. Let this woman read Homer, Plautus, Boccaccio, etc.
I think a more appropriate comparison would be to Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover. A story of a young girl being introduced to sex by an older man as seen in hindsight by that girl as an adult (it was an adaptation of an autobiographic book by Marguerite Duras), it also has a distinct historical and cultural background (colonialism) supposedly used as a kind of metaphor or a colliding reference to the personal relationship or vise versa. Hopefully The Reader is a better film.flipp525 wrote:I'm surprised that the writer of this article didn't mention Lolita, which would be the obvious literary as well as cinematic point of reference for the reverse situation.
Interesting. If I recall correctly, the book doesn't delve into the morality of the inappropriateness of what's going on either (or, if it does, it's only mentioned in passing). It similarly luxuriates in the fascination the boy (speaking from the distance of adulthood) has/had with Hanna and then picks up when we get to the heart of who she really is. If anything, it sounds like the film version has fleshed his character out a bit. In the book, he's sort of caught in a somnambulent trance being led through his life by his continued obsession with an older woman.
I'm surprised that the writer of this article didn't mention Lolita, which would be the obvious literary as well as cinematic point of reference for the reverse situation.
Edited By flipp525 on 1228511406
I'm surprised that the writer of this article didn't mention Lolita, which would be the obvious literary as well as cinematic point of reference for the reverse situation.
Edited By flipp525 on 1228511406
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Thelma Adams takes issue with 'The Reader' in the Huffington post. I think the answer is simple: men are dogs, women become them. It's as simple as that.
READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE READER: WHEN IS ABUSE NOT ABUSE?
The Reader? It's goodish. And Kate Winslet is, as ever, brilliant. And it has Nazis, which elevates it on the Oscar nom scale. But I'm not critiquing it here. I'm addressing its portrayal of child abuse - an adult having sex with a minor. I'm curious about the pass the disturbingly intimate relationship between a mature woman and an adolescent boy seems to be getting in David Hare's adaptation of Bernard Schlink's novel, as directed by Stephen Daldry. Pivotal to the romantic tragedy is the passionate post-war affair between a 36.year-old female German tram conductor Hanna (Winslet) and a dewy 15-year-old virgin Michael (David Kross). During their multiple, wonderfully lit, detailed erotic scenes, we see plenty of bare gorgeous Winslet indoctrinating the equally nude boy into the ways of slow sex that please a woman, and leave a man satisfied as well. Trust me: they both look very yummy - or judge for your self. View the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2319450137/
But, reverse the genders and consider a parallel, made up example. Imagine an intellectual period drama (perhaps they quote Chekhov and Homer, too) in which Hugh Jackman, 39, and Miley Cyrus, 16, play characters that have explicit sex. OK, so maybe there's an underlying awful secret -- he participated in aboriginal genocide, or ratted out Reds in Hollywood, or upheld apartheid in South Africa but... while the camera rolls, the focus of the scenes is the sex and intimacy that occurs in bed and bathtub, between two beautiful bodies, one experienced and dominant, the other ripely pubescent. Reverse the genders - older man deflowers underage girl - and there would be a public outcry. Look no further than Miley's scandalous Vanity Fair/Annie Liebowitz bare back photo and multiply it times ten. Is there any doubt that, even if the younger partner "consents," this is statutory rape because she's a minor and, by definition, under the age of consent?
What's interesting is the blatant double-standard in Western cultures when it comes to the relations between an adult and a minor - when the pair happens to be an older woman, younger male. When I wrote about the treatment of women teachers hitting on their pubescent male students - aka Clearasil Cougars - like Mary Kay Letourneau in the November issue of Marie Claire http://www.marieclaire.com/world/news/teachers-sex-with-students-rape, I wondered whether these hook-ups are any different from male teachers molesting female students? What I discovered is that our society often treats the victims as lucky boys being eased through a tricky rite of passage. It's the Mrs. Robinson, Summer of 42 syndrome. Fifty years ago, small-town grandpas took their pimply grandsons to a local prostitute to lose their virginity. And, in The Reader, mother-aged Hanna saves Michael from the unbearable awkwardness of unhooking some same-age Gretel's bra. Our society actually, leniently views "consensual" sex between older women and teenage boys, like marijuana smoking or underage drinking. Male judges -and Hollywood execs -- give it a wink and a pass (right on, junior!).
Ultimately what's curiously disturbing about The Reader has little to do with Nazis. As Michael grows up and Ralph Fiennes replaces David Kross in the role, the adult suffers from the kind of failure at mature sexual and intimate relationships - with his wife, daughter, and mother - that often typifies abuse victims. He's distant and at least his daughter believes the culpability is hers; he doesn't love her because of who she is, not his adolescent secret. When we first see the adult Michael, he's having an affair of the bed - but clearly not of the heart - with a gorgeous woman nearly young enough to be his daughter. And, as the mistress complains that Michael won't let her in to his life, he clearly can't wait until she leaves his apartment so that he can be alone with himself and his memories. It's textbook abused behavior - and all the movie's ambiguities about Nazis, hidden secrets, and admitting culpability don't fully address the fact that Michael is both the victim of abuse, and lost in his continued love for his abuser, because nothing since has come close to that intensity. Emotionally, he stopped growing at 15.
Michael is a victim of abuse, and his abuser just happened to have been a luscious retired Auschwitz guard. You can call their tryst and its consequences a metaphor of two generations of Germans passing guilt from one to the next, but that doesn't explain why filmmakers Daldry and Hare luxuriated in the sex scenes -- and why it's so tastefully done audiences won't see it for the child pornography it is.
READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE READER: WHEN IS ABUSE NOT ABUSE?
The Reader? It's goodish. And Kate Winslet is, as ever, brilliant. And it has Nazis, which elevates it on the Oscar nom scale. But I'm not critiquing it here. I'm addressing its portrayal of child abuse - an adult having sex with a minor. I'm curious about the pass the disturbingly intimate relationship between a mature woman and an adolescent boy seems to be getting in David Hare's adaptation of Bernard Schlink's novel, as directed by Stephen Daldry. Pivotal to the romantic tragedy is the passionate post-war affair between a 36.year-old female German tram conductor Hanna (Winslet) and a dewy 15-year-old virgin Michael (David Kross). During their multiple, wonderfully lit, detailed erotic scenes, we see plenty of bare gorgeous Winslet indoctrinating the equally nude boy into the ways of slow sex that please a woman, and leave a man satisfied as well. Trust me: they both look very yummy - or judge for your self. View the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2319450137/
But, reverse the genders and consider a parallel, made up example. Imagine an intellectual period drama (perhaps they quote Chekhov and Homer, too) in which Hugh Jackman, 39, and Miley Cyrus, 16, play characters that have explicit sex. OK, so maybe there's an underlying awful secret -- he participated in aboriginal genocide, or ratted out Reds in Hollywood, or upheld apartheid in South Africa but... while the camera rolls, the focus of the scenes is the sex and intimacy that occurs in bed and bathtub, between two beautiful bodies, one experienced and dominant, the other ripely pubescent. Reverse the genders - older man deflowers underage girl - and there would be a public outcry. Look no further than Miley's scandalous Vanity Fair/Annie Liebowitz bare back photo and multiply it times ten. Is there any doubt that, even if the younger partner "consents," this is statutory rape because she's a minor and, by definition, under the age of consent?
What's interesting is the blatant double-standard in Western cultures when it comes to the relations between an adult and a minor - when the pair happens to be an older woman, younger male. When I wrote about the treatment of women teachers hitting on their pubescent male students - aka Clearasil Cougars - like Mary Kay Letourneau in the November issue of Marie Claire http://www.marieclaire.com/world/news/teachers-sex-with-students-rape, I wondered whether these hook-ups are any different from male teachers molesting female students? What I discovered is that our society often treats the victims as lucky boys being eased through a tricky rite of passage. It's the Mrs. Robinson, Summer of 42 syndrome. Fifty years ago, small-town grandpas took their pimply grandsons to a local prostitute to lose their virginity. And, in The Reader, mother-aged Hanna saves Michael from the unbearable awkwardness of unhooking some same-age Gretel's bra. Our society actually, leniently views "consensual" sex between older women and teenage boys, like marijuana smoking or underage drinking. Male judges -and Hollywood execs -- give it a wink and a pass (right on, junior!).
Ultimately what's curiously disturbing about The Reader has little to do with Nazis. As Michael grows up and Ralph Fiennes replaces David Kross in the role, the adult suffers from the kind of failure at mature sexual and intimate relationships - with his wife, daughter, and mother - that often typifies abuse victims. He's distant and at least his daughter believes the culpability is hers; he doesn't love her because of who she is, not his adolescent secret. When we first see the adult Michael, he's having an affair of the bed - but clearly not of the heart - with a gorgeous woman nearly young enough to be his daughter. And, as the mistress complains that Michael won't let her in to his life, he clearly can't wait until she leaves his apartment so that he can be alone with himself and his memories. It's textbook abused behavior - and all the movie's ambiguities about Nazis, hidden secrets, and admitting culpability don't fully address the fact that Michael is both the victim of abuse, and lost in his continued love for his abuser, because nothing since has come close to that intensity. Emotionally, he stopped growing at 15.
Michael is a victim of abuse, and his abuser just happened to have been a luscious retired Auschwitz guard. You can call their tryst and its consequences a metaphor of two generations of Germans passing guilt from one to the next, but that doesn't explain why filmmakers Daldry and Hare luxuriated in the sex scenes -- and why it's so tastefully done audiences won't see it for the child pornography it is.
"How's the despair?"
Jeffrey Wells is trumpeting that the movie is allegedly done. That's not what these reviews seem to indicate at all though. It seems like the kind of film that the National Board of Review and the Hollywood Foreign Press would eat up. It doesn't seem like it has what it takes to win in this season but if Academy voters opted for 'Atonement' over the less austere 'Into the Wild' and 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly', 'The Reader' is at least still in the running.
"How's the despair?"
It probably was not well phrased, but I'd give him the benefit of a doubt. I haven't seen the film, but based on the book, this is not your average holocaust crowd pleaser, since it has in its core a kind of empathic display of a Nazi criminal. If this was what this person was aiming for, he's right.Mister Tee wrote:This sentence from the Screen Daily review has to be the most ill-informed I've read since the political season ended.
"Although older awards voters will find the Holocaust-themed film an uncomfortable one to watch, it will inevitably be a leading contender in multiple categories and could finally deliver Winslet her Oscar. "
Yeah...those older voters just can't stomach Holocaust movies.
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Mister Tee
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This sentence from the Screen Daily review has to be the most ill-informed I've read since the political season ended.
"Although older awards voters will find the Holocaust-themed film an uncomfortable one to watch, it will inevitably be a leading contender in multiple categories and could finally deliver Winslet her Oscar. "
Yeah...those older voters just can't stomach Holocaust movies.
"Although older awards voters will find the Holocaust-themed film an uncomfortable one to watch, it will inevitably be a leading contender in multiple categories and could finally deliver Winslet her Oscar. "
Yeah...those older voters just can't stomach Holocaust movies.
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Mister Tee
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And, Screen Daily.
The Reader
Mike Goodridge in Los Angeles
30 Nov 2008 17:05
Dir: Stephen Daldry. 2008.US/UK/Germany. 122 mins.
Although it struggles under the weight of its source novel's multiple temporal shifts, The Reader is for the most part a superbly fluid, elegant film crafted with distinctly European sensibilities which suit the bitter story at its heart. Stephen Daldry's third film tones down the heart-on-sleeve emotion of Billy Elliot and The Hours and brings Bernhard Schlink's bestseller to the screen with all its melancholy and stomach-churning dilemmas intact. It takes Daldry to another level as a film-maker of great nuance, and should be a major draw for intelligent audiences everywhere.
The Hours screenwriter David Hare delivers an intelligent adaptation of the book, again in roughly three parts, and the performances here, in particular by Kate Winslet in the film's central and most difficult role, are stupendous. Although older awards voters will find the Holocaust-themed film an uncomfortable one to watch, it will inevitably be a leading contender in multiple categories and could finally deliver Winslet her Oscar.
In a season full of stories about life under The Third Reich (Valkyrie, Defiance, Good), The Reader is the most meaningful, in that it looks at the legacy of Nazi evil on the next generation of Germans. Schlink's provocative story becomes an analogy for all Germans as they struggled – and indeed still struggle - to balance the shame at their parents' actions and complicity with notions of love, understanding and forgiveness.
International film-goers will respond to the story more than wider US audiences. There are no black and white characters or situations in The Reader, and the difficult questions it raises for the viewer will be hard for the multiplex crowd to embrace. Even in its final sequences, The Reader can only offer limited redemption. For that reason, not to mention a measure of unbridled sexual activity, it feels like a European film, and not what you'd expect from a Weinstein-backed end-of-year awards contender set in Europe like Chocolat or Finding Neverland.
The story starts in 1958 in a West German town when the lead character Michael Berg (played by 18-year-old German actor Kross) is 15 years old. While walking home one day, he falls sick with the first symptoms of scarlet fever and is helped back to his parents' house by a passer-by called Hannah Schmitz (Winslet), a bus conductor more than twice his age.
Once he has recovered, the two begin an affair which consumes Michael's thoughts. The two have sex every day after which he reads literature to her at her urging. One day, however, Hannah packs her bags and disappears without a trace, devastating the youthful Michael.
The second section of the film moves forward eight years to 1966. Michael is now at law school and is one of several students who go to witness a nearby war crimes trial. There he sees Hannah again, in the dock with four other women. All were guards at a concentration camp during the war and they are being tried specifically for letting 300 Jewish women burn to death in a church bombing. Hannah is being portrayed as the ringleader of the group and a stunned Michael realises that he has information which could help her case.
The third section stops at points throughout the next three decades as Michael (now played by Fiennes) battles his own feelings for the imprisoned Hannah with his disgust for her crimes. This is the film's least successful part, relying on jumps between large stretches of time and heavy ageing makeup on Winslet which jars with the authenticity of what has come before. (Similar attempts to age Lena Olin, playing a survivor of the fire, are equally distracting.)
Kross is notably natural as the young Michael and he meets every challenge thrown his way from the charged scenes of sex and nudity with Winslet to his character's disillusionment in the second section. Fiennes carries a wrenching sadness in his scenes. But the film belongs to Winslet as Hannah. Speaking with a hard, monotone, German accent, the actress brings a blank, haunted quality to this isolated woman, who is on the one hand lonely and hungry for love, on the other a willing, not entirely unrepentant participant in genocide. As the character ages, Winslet makes her both heartbreaking and pathetic as she achieves a level of remorse.
The film is dedicated to the late producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack and it is a fitting testament to their legacy. As if on cue in the light of the former's untimely death, Daldry proves himself a worthy inheritor of Minghella's mantle as one of Europe's most compassionate and literate film-makers.
The Reader
Mike Goodridge in Los Angeles
30 Nov 2008 17:05
Dir: Stephen Daldry. 2008.US/UK/Germany. 122 mins.
Although it struggles under the weight of its source novel's multiple temporal shifts, The Reader is for the most part a superbly fluid, elegant film crafted with distinctly European sensibilities which suit the bitter story at its heart. Stephen Daldry's third film tones down the heart-on-sleeve emotion of Billy Elliot and The Hours and brings Bernhard Schlink's bestseller to the screen with all its melancholy and stomach-churning dilemmas intact. It takes Daldry to another level as a film-maker of great nuance, and should be a major draw for intelligent audiences everywhere.
The Hours screenwriter David Hare delivers an intelligent adaptation of the book, again in roughly three parts, and the performances here, in particular by Kate Winslet in the film's central and most difficult role, are stupendous. Although older awards voters will find the Holocaust-themed film an uncomfortable one to watch, it will inevitably be a leading contender in multiple categories and could finally deliver Winslet her Oscar.
In a season full of stories about life under The Third Reich (Valkyrie, Defiance, Good), The Reader is the most meaningful, in that it looks at the legacy of Nazi evil on the next generation of Germans. Schlink's provocative story becomes an analogy for all Germans as they struggled – and indeed still struggle - to balance the shame at their parents' actions and complicity with notions of love, understanding and forgiveness.
International film-goers will respond to the story more than wider US audiences. There are no black and white characters or situations in The Reader, and the difficult questions it raises for the viewer will be hard for the multiplex crowd to embrace. Even in its final sequences, The Reader can only offer limited redemption. For that reason, not to mention a measure of unbridled sexual activity, it feels like a European film, and not what you'd expect from a Weinstein-backed end-of-year awards contender set in Europe like Chocolat or Finding Neverland.
The story starts in 1958 in a West German town when the lead character Michael Berg (played by 18-year-old German actor Kross) is 15 years old. While walking home one day, he falls sick with the first symptoms of scarlet fever and is helped back to his parents' house by a passer-by called Hannah Schmitz (Winslet), a bus conductor more than twice his age.
Once he has recovered, the two begin an affair which consumes Michael's thoughts. The two have sex every day after which he reads literature to her at her urging. One day, however, Hannah packs her bags and disappears without a trace, devastating the youthful Michael.
The second section of the film moves forward eight years to 1966. Michael is now at law school and is one of several students who go to witness a nearby war crimes trial. There he sees Hannah again, in the dock with four other women. All were guards at a concentration camp during the war and they are being tried specifically for letting 300 Jewish women burn to death in a church bombing. Hannah is being portrayed as the ringleader of the group and a stunned Michael realises that he has information which could help her case.
The third section stops at points throughout the next three decades as Michael (now played by Fiennes) battles his own feelings for the imprisoned Hannah with his disgust for her crimes. This is the film's least successful part, relying on jumps between large stretches of time and heavy ageing makeup on Winslet which jars with the authenticity of what has come before. (Similar attempts to age Lena Olin, playing a survivor of the fire, are equally distracting.)
Kross is notably natural as the young Michael and he meets every challenge thrown his way from the charged scenes of sex and nudity with Winslet to his character's disillusionment in the second section. Fiennes carries a wrenching sadness in his scenes. But the film belongs to Winslet as Hannah. Speaking with a hard, monotone, German accent, the actress brings a blank, haunted quality to this isolated woman, who is on the one hand lonely and hungry for love, on the other a willing, not entirely unrepentant participant in genocide. As the character ages, Winslet makes her both heartbreaking and pathetic as she achieves a level of remorse.
The film is dedicated to the late producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack and it is a fitting testament to their legacy. As if on cue in the light of the former's untimely death, Daldry proves himself a worthy inheritor of Minghella's mantle as one of Europe's most compassionate and literate film-makers.
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Mister Tee
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Film Review: The Reader
By Kirk Honeycutt, November 30, 2008 11:00 ET
Bottom Line: A love affair between a younger man and an older woman sharply reflects the conflicts between Germany's war and postwar generations
During the making of "The Reader," producers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella passed away. This last film is a testament to the kind of productions each was associated with in his career -- films of entertainment, often with stars, that also reach out in terms of situations, themes and settings to embrace larger issues that confront society.
"The Reader" is a well-told coming-of-age yarn about a young boy growing up in postwar West Germany and experiencing his first love affair. But the outreach is to an issue crucial in that country but also genuinely disturbing to any viewer. This is the troubling dilemma of Germany's so-called "second generation," which had to come to terms with the Nazi era and a Holocaust perpetuated by parents, teachers and even lovers.
Certainly "The Reader," for all its erotic scenes involving Kate Winslet, presents a difficult marketing challenge. The lively, nonlinear structure imposed by screenwriter David Hare and tight, focused direction from Stephen Daldry make this an engaging period drama. But German postwar guilt is not the most winning subject matter for the holiday season. The film opens Dec. 10, expands Christmas Day and goes national Jan. 9.
"The Reader," based on Bernhard Schlink's controversial German novel, deliberately places a Holocaust perpetrator at the story's focal point. But since we first meet her in an entirely different light, as a kind, loving and passionate woman, it explores the challenges of this second generation in navigating a welter of deeply psychological and morally complex issues.
The film opens in 1995 Berlin, where Ralph Fiennes plays aloof, emotionally numb attorney Michael Berg. We're swiftly conveyed back to 1958, when his younger self (very well played by David Kross) has a chance encounter that will forever affect him. Coming down with what he later learns is scarlet fever, he is helped home by a stranger, Hanna (Winslet). Upon recovering, he looks her up to thank her and is startled to find himself losing his virginity to her. They embark on an affair with its own kind of feverish urgency.
As part of their bedroom rituals, he starts to read to her from books by Mark Twain, Homer and Anton Chekhov. She calls him "Kid" and clearly an "oldness" afflicts her beyond her years. Yet there is a kind of role reversal in his reading to her that allows him to expose her to worlds she never knew.
Then she disappears. Eight years later, as Michael attends a war crimes trial as a law student in Heidelberg, she makes a startling reappearance as a defendant. Michael is shaken to his core by growing evidence that his first love is, by any standard, a monster. But how does one deal with a monster who is a lover? One can only condemn her; but in that condemnation, where lies the process of understanding?
The film makes no attempt to answer this question if indeed there is an answer. There is an explanation, not immediately apparent, for why Hanna found herself in a position to dictate life or death. But there is neither an excuse nor an offer of atonement ready for her.
Neither Hare nor Daldry shows us any easy way to look at this character. They muddy the waters and complicate the emotions, but the facts of her actions smother any possible empathy.
What remains unclear, in the film at least, is why Michael has seemingly never thought about any of this before 1966. Did he never question his father -- depicted here as a stern, unsympathetic man -- about what he did during the war?
To Winslet and Kross belong the gutsy, intense performances of the film. Lena Olin as a unyielding camp survivor and Bruno Ganz as a sagacious law professor put in memorable appearances. Fiennes is solid as the elder Berg, but by this stage of life the "oldness" Hanna once exhibited has caught up with him too, making his a somewhat listless role.
Superior production work in Germany by top professionals led by two of the world's finest cinematographers in Chris Menges and Roger Deakins gives what is a very tough story a fine professional polish.
By Kirk Honeycutt, November 30, 2008 11:00 ET
Bottom Line: A love affair between a younger man and an older woman sharply reflects the conflicts between Germany's war and postwar generations
During the making of "The Reader," producers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella passed away. This last film is a testament to the kind of productions each was associated with in his career -- films of entertainment, often with stars, that also reach out in terms of situations, themes and settings to embrace larger issues that confront society.
"The Reader" is a well-told coming-of-age yarn about a young boy growing up in postwar West Germany and experiencing his first love affair. But the outreach is to an issue crucial in that country but also genuinely disturbing to any viewer. This is the troubling dilemma of Germany's so-called "second generation," which had to come to terms with the Nazi era and a Holocaust perpetuated by parents, teachers and even lovers.
Certainly "The Reader," for all its erotic scenes involving Kate Winslet, presents a difficult marketing challenge. The lively, nonlinear structure imposed by screenwriter David Hare and tight, focused direction from Stephen Daldry make this an engaging period drama. But German postwar guilt is not the most winning subject matter for the holiday season. The film opens Dec. 10, expands Christmas Day and goes national Jan. 9.
"The Reader," based on Bernhard Schlink's controversial German novel, deliberately places a Holocaust perpetrator at the story's focal point. But since we first meet her in an entirely different light, as a kind, loving and passionate woman, it explores the challenges of this second generation in navigating a welter of deeply psychological and morally complex issues.
The film opens in 1995 Berlin, where Ralph Fiennes plays aloof, emotionally numb attorney Michael Berg. We're swiftly conveyed back to 1958, when his younger self (very well played by David Kross) has a chance encounter that will forever affect him. Coming down with what he later learns is scarlet fever, he is helped home by a stranger, Hanna (Winslet). Upon recovering, he looks her up to thank her and is startled to find himself losing his virginity to her. They embark on an affair with its own kind of feverish urgency.
As part of their bedroom rituals, he starts to read to her from books by Mark Twain, Homer and Anton Chekhov. She calls him "Kid" and clearly an "oldness" afflicts her beyond her years. Yet there is a kind of role reversal in his reading to her that allows him to expose her to worlds she never knew.
Then she disappears. Eight years later, as Michael attends a war crimes trial as a law student in Heidelberg, she makes a startling reappearance as a defendant. Michael is shaken to his core by growing evidence that his first love is, by any standard, a monster. But how does one deal with a monster who is a lover? One can only condemn her; but in that condemnation, where lies the process of understanding?
The film makes no attempt to answer this question if indeed there is an answer. There is an explanation, not immediately apparent, for why Hanna found herself in a position to dictate life or death. But there is neither an excuse nor an offer of atonement ready for her.
Neither Hare nor Daldry shows us any easy way to look at this character. They muddy the waters and complicate the emotions, but the facts of her actions smother any possible empathy.
What remains unclear, in the film at least, is why Michael has seemingly never thought about any of this before 1966. Did he never question his father -- depicted here as a stern, unsympathetic man -- about what he did during the war?
To Winslet and Kross belong the gutsy, intense performances of the film. Lena Olin as a unyielding camp survivor and Bruno Ganz as a sagacious law professor put in memorable appearances. Fiennes is solid as the elder Berg, but by this stage of life the "oldness" Hanna once exhibited has caught up with him too, making his a somewhat listless role.
Superior production work in Germany by top professionals led by two of the world's finest cinematographers in Chris Menges and Roger Deakins gives what is a very tough story a fine professional polish.
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The Reader
(U.S. - Germany )
By TODD MCCARTHY
Sober intelligence goes only so far in crafting an effective bigscreen version of the international bestseller "The Reader." German author Bernhard Schlink's succinct, widely admired 1995 novel, which parts company with most Holocaust literature by placing a perpetrator, not a victim, at the story's center, uses a late-1950s affair between a former concentration camp guard and a teenager half her age to explore both generations' difficulty in coming to terms with German war guilt. Stephen Daldry's film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact. Classy package will appeal to upscale specialized auds and the bookish set but pic will have trouble crossing over to the general public Stateside. Offshore prospects look stronger.
Crisscrossing narrative lines that were laid out chronologically in the novel, David Hare's astringent screenplay dispenses gradations of accountability across the decades, beginning with Nazi functionaries who might well have been just "doing their jobs" to members of the "second generation" of the postwar period who had to decide how to react to and judge their elders. The intense sexual relationship serves as a simple, effective metaphor for the elemental generational link, as well as for the shame and uncertainty of how to deal with the fallout.
A chance meeting and an act of kindness lead to a first tango in Neustadt between Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a cold, severe but nonetheless attractive woman in her mid-30s who collects tram fares, and 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross), a bright, well-built student who lives with his middle-class family. Transforming with startling but convincing rapidity from an uncertain teen into a cocky young man, Michael begins dropping by Hanna's flat every day after school for his sentimental education, which is illustrated by Daldry judiciously but with plenty of nudity.
Title stems from Hanna's request that Michael read to her after or, preferably, before their physical exertions. His selections stick to the classics: "The Odyssey," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Chekhov, for starters. When the "kid," as Hanna always calls him, launches into "Lady Chatterley's Lover," she deems it "disgusting" before instructing him to continue reading. Michael takes Hanna on a country outing one day, writes a poem about her and is sufficiently smitten to rebuff the attentions of even his most attractive female classmates.
But one day, Hanna is gone, her flat emptied out. Story proper then jumps eight years to 1966, when Michael is a law student under the tutelage of Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz). When their class attends the trial of several middle-aged women who worked as SS guards at concentration camps during the war, one of them, to Michael's horror, is Hanna.
Michael tells no one of his personal connection; in fact, we have previously heard the older incarnation of Michael (Ralph Fiennes), who's become a lawyer, tell his daughter (Hannah Herzsprung), "I'm aware I wasn't always open with you. I'm not open with anyone."
As the trial wears on, however, his fear of revelation begins to tear him up inside, as he possesses some information that could help Hanna's defense. Thus are the attitudes of younger Germans toward Nazi crimes in which they had no direct involvement held up for scrutiny, as part of the necessarily gradual course of processing the truth, reconciling the generations and moving ahead as individuals and a nation.
Fiennes' middle-aged Michael, who is seen early on trying to connect with his daughter, comes to the fore in the latter stages as the Michael-Hanna drama plays out its final act in an ironic manner that speaks to the potential of rehabilitation and never-too-late education. One of the film's best scenes is a sort-of postscript, in which Michael goes to New York City to visit a wealthy, stylish woman (Lena Olin) who wrote a book with her mother about surviving the camp and the subsequent conflagration where Hanna exercised authority. Interchange between Fiennes and Olin has a snap and electricity missing elsewhere despite dedicated efforts across the board.
A central problem with "The Reader" as a film is that one can never look inside the character of Hanna. Her life and behavior are invariably assessed from the outside -- what she represents to Michael, the way the court and history take stock of her actions -- but never by her. In fact, she denies that her own self-evaluation is of any importance. "It doesn't matter what I feel, it doesn't matter what I think," she insists when asked about wartime atrocities. "The dead are still dead."
Winslet supplies a haunting shell to this internally decimated woman, one who can perhaps momentarily escape from her shame through sex but for whom there is no past she can possibly face and no future to anticipate. She and Kross enact the intimate scenes with impressive delicacy and credible desire, and the young German actor, who has rounder, fleshier features than Fiennes but still manages the match, shows confidence and promise (much is made in the press materials about how the production shut down until his 18th birthday before embarking upon the sex scenes). Fiennes deftly invests the grown-up Michael with an emotional limp, and the decision to have all the actors speak English with a softly suggestive German accent works pretty well.
Supporting cast and locations have been smartly chosen, and the modern Germany of the later scenes contrasts sharply with the Old World hangover look of the '50s. Score by Nico Muhly is supple, unusual and superbly supportive.
Film looks splendid, pretty much a given when both Chris Menges and Roger Deakins are credited. Reportedly, Deakins prepared the picture and began shooting, mostly with the Fiennes material. But when the production halted for a while during the writers' strike, Deakins moved on to "Doubt" and Menges took over as cinematographer when lensing recommenced.
The late producing partners Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack receive a special "in loving memory" dedication. Another producer, Scott Rudin, removed his name from the film a couple of months ago due to disputes with Harvey and Bob Weinstein over rushing to finish it before year's end.
(U.S. - Germany )
By TODD MCCARTHY
Sober intelligence goes only so far in crafting an effective bigscreen version of the international bestseller "The Reader." German author Bernhard Schlink's succinct, widely admired 1995 novel, which parts company with most Holocaust literature by placing a perpetrator, not a victim, at the story's center, uses a late-1950s affair between a former concentration camp guard and a teenager half her age to explore both generations' difficulty in coming to terms with German war guilt. Stephen Daldry's film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact. Classy package will appeal to upscale specialized auds and the bookish set but pic will have trouble crossing over to the general public Stateside. Offshore prospects look stronger.
Crisscrossing narrative lines that were laid out chronologically in the novel, David Hare's astringent screenplay dispenses gradations of accountability across the decades, beginning with Nazi functionaries who might well have been just "doing their jobs" to members of the "second generation" of the postwar period who had to decide how to react to and judge their elders. The intense sexual relationship serves as a simple, effective metaphor for the elemental generational link, as well as for the shame and uncertainty of how to deal with the fallout.
A chance meeting and an act of kindness lead to a first tango in Neustadt between Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a cold, severe but nonetheless attractive woman in her mid-30s who collects tram fares, and 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross), a bright, well-built student who lives with his middle-class family. Transforming with startling but convincing rapidity from an uncertain teen into a cocky young man, Michael begins dropping by Hanna's flat every day after school for his sentimental education, which is illustrated by Daldry judiciously but with plenty of nudity.
Title stems from Hanna's request that Michael read to her after or, preferably, before their physical exertions. His selections stick to the classics: "The Odyssey," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Chekhov, for starters. When the "kid," as Hanna always calls him, launches into "Lady Chatterley's Lover," she deems it "disgusting" before instructing him to continue reading. Michael takes Hanna on a country outing one day, writes a poem about her and is sufficiently smitten to rebuff the attentions of even his most attractive female classmates.
But one day, Hanna is gone, her flat emptied out. Story proper then jumps eight years to 1966, when Michael is a law student under the tutelage of Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz). When their class attends the trial of several middle-aged women who worked as SS guards at concentration camps during the war, one of them, to Michael's horror, is Hanna.
Michael tells no one of his personal connection; in fact, we have previously heard the older incarnation of Michael (Ralph Fiennes), who's become a lawyer, tell his daughter (Hannah Herzsprung), "I'm aware I wasn't always open with you. I'm not open with anyone."
As the trial wears on, however, his fear of revelation begins to tear him up inside, as he possesses some information that could help Hanna's defense. Thus are the attitudes of younger Germans toward Nazi crimes in which they had no direct involvement held up for scrutiny, as part of the necessarily gradual course of processing the truth, reconciling the generations and moving ahead as individuals and a nation.
Fiennes' middle-aged Michael, who is seen early on trying to connect with his daughter, comes to the fore in the latter stages as the Michael-Hanna drama plays out its final act in an ironic manner that speaks to the potential of rehabilitation and never-too-late education. One of the film's best scenes is a sort-of postscript, in which Michael goes to New York City to visit a wealthy, stylish woman (Lena Olin) who wrote a book with her mother about surviving the camp and the subsequent conflagration where Hanna exercised authority. Interchange between Fiennes and Olin has a snap and electricity missing elsewhere despite dedicated efforts across the board.
A central problem with "The Reader" as a film is that one can never look inside the character of Hanna. Her life and behavior are invariably assessed from the outside -- what she represents to Michael, the way the court and history take stock of her actions -- but never by her. In fact, she denies that her own self-evaluation is of any importance. "It doesn't matter what I feel, it doesn't matter what I think," she insists when asked about wartime atrocities. "The dead are still dead."
Winslet supplies a haunting shell to this internally decimated woman, one who can perhaps momentarily escape from her shame through sex but for whom there is no past she can possibly face and no future to anticipate. She and Kross enact the intimate scenes with impressive delicacy and credible desire, and the young German actor, who has rounder, fleshier features than Fiennes but still manages the match, shows confidence and promise (much is made in the press materials about how the production shut down until his 18th birthday before embarking upon the sex scenes). Fiennes deftly invests the grown-up Michael with an emotional limp, and the decision to have all the actors speak English with a softly suggestive German accent works pretty well.
Supporting cast and locations have been smartly chosen, and the modern Germany of the later scenes contrasts sharply with the Old World hangover look of the '50s. Score by Nico Muhly is supple, unusual and superbly supportive.
Film looks splendid, pretty much a given when both Chris Menges and Roger Deakins are credited. Reportedly, Deakins prepared the picture and began shooting, mostly with the Fiennes material. But when the production halted for a while during the writers' strike, Deakins moved on to "Doubt" and Menges took over as cinematographer when lensing recommenced.
The late producing partners Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack receive a special "in loving memory" dedication. Another producer, Scott Rudin, removed his name from the film a couple of months ago due to disputes with Harvey and Bob Weinstein over rushing to finish it before year's end.
FROM HOLLYWOOD-ELSEWHERE...
Stephen Daldry's The Reader, which had its first press screenings today on both coasts, "feels rushed," in the view of In Contention's Kris Tapley. "It's an oddly disorienting narrative," he writes, "that takes some time settling into an emotional groove, but when it does, it packs affecting punch."
Calling a film "rushed" and "oddly disorienting" are obviously negative sentiments. Fair game and all that, but I was under the impression there was a review embargo in effect until 12.1 or thereabouts...no? I saw it earlier this afternoon in the 5th floor Brill building screening room, but I intend to hold my water until further notice.
"The weird thing is it feels [as if it's] have transported me back to the mid-1990s," Tapley says. "This is a film that recalls the heyday of Harvey Weinstein's grip on this time of year, perhaps in atmosphere more than quality. It should be no surprise, then, that Anthony Minghella is one of the producers attached. There are echoes of his work throughout, and really, Daldry might be the only filmmaker with the right doses of prestige and dramatic flavor to take up Minghella's mantle.
"I have to mention Nico Muhly's exemplary score," Tapley adds, "and the exquisite photography from Chris Menges and Roger Deakins, both credited."
Stephen Daldry's The Reader, which had its first press screenings today on both coasts, "feels rushed," in the view of In Contention's Kris Tapley. "It's an oddly disorienting narrative," he writes, "that takes some time settling into an emotional groove, but when it does, it packs affecting punch."
Calling a film "rushed" and "oddly disorienting" are obviously negative sentiments. Fair game and all that, but I was under the impression there was a review embargo in effect until 12.1 or thereabouts...no? I saw it earlier this afternoon in the 5th floor Brill building screening room, but I intend to hold my water until further notice.
"The weird thing is it feels [as if it's] have transported me back to the mid-1990s," Tapley says. "This is a film that recalls the heyday of Harvey Weinstein's grip on this time of year, perhaps in atmosphere more than quality. It should be no surprise, then, that Anthony Minghella is one of the producers attached. There are echoes of his work throughout, and really, Daldry might be the only filmmaker with the right doses of prestige and dramatic flavor to take up Minghella's mantle.
"I have to mention Nico Muhly's exemplary score," Tapley adds, "and the exquisite photography from Chris Menges and Roger Deakins, both credited."
"How's the despair?"
I have seen both Revolutionary Road and The Reader...
Kate's role in RR is great, nothing less but great. BUT, her role in The Reader is historical, ageless, one of the best female performances EVER. Her April in RR is something you have seen many times before. But guys, not The Reader. She deserves every single award for that role...
Kate's role in RR is great, nothing less but great. BUT, her role in The Reader is historical, ageless, one of the best female performances EVER. Her April in RR is something you have seen many times before. But guys, not The Reader. She deserves every single award for that role...