The Reader (2008)
The Reader is a 2008 British drama film based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink. The film adaptation was written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry. Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet star along with the young actor David Kross. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died before it was released. Production began in Germany in September 2007, and the film opened in limited release on 10 December 2008.
It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a teenager in the late 1950s had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past, a secret that may cost her at the trial.
Winslet and David Kross, who plays the young Michael, have received much praise for their performances. Winslet received praise and won a Golden Globe Award, BAFTA Awards, Screen Actors Guild award and the Best Actress Academy Award in 2009 for her role in the film. The film has also been nominated for several other major awards.
Plot
The Reader begins in 1995 Berlin, where Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is preparing breakfast for a woman who has spent the night with him. After she leaves, Michael watches a U-Bahn pass by, flashing back to a tram in 1958 Neustadt. A teenage Michael (David Kross) gets off because he is feeling sick and wanders around the streets afterwards, finally pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he vomits. Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), the tram conductor, comes in and assists him in returning home.
Michael, diagnosed with scarlet fever, must rest at home for the next three months. After he recovers he visits Hanna. The two begin an affair. During their liaisons, at her apartment, he reads to her literary works he is studying, such as The Odyssey, The Lady with the Little Dog and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After a bicycling trip, Hanna learns she is being promoted to a clerical job at the tram company. She abruptly moves without leaving a trace.
After seeing the adult Michael, a lawyer, we see him at Heidelberg University law school in 1966. As part of a special seminar taught by Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz), a camp survivor, he observes a trial of several women who were accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the death march following the 1944 evacuation of Auschwitz. Hanna is one of the defendants.
Stunned, Michael visits a former camp himself. The trial divides the seminar, with one student angrily saying there is nothing to be learned from it other than that evil acts occurred and that the older generation of Germans should kill themselves for their failure to act then.
The key evidence is the testimony of Ilana Mather (Alexandra Maria Lara), author of a memoir of how she and her mother survived. Hanna, unlike her fellow defendants, admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the ten women she chose during each month’s Selektion were gassed. She denies authorship of a report on the church fire, despite pressure from the other defendants, but then admits it when asked to provide a handwriting sample.
Michael then realizes Hanna’s secret: she is functionally illiterate and has concealed that her whole life. She joined the SS to avoid a job promotion that would have revealed it. Michael informs Rohl that he has information favorable to one of the defendants but is not sure what to do since she wants to avoid disclosing this. Rohl tells him that if he has learned nothing from the past there is no point in having the seminar.
Hanna receives a life sentence for her role in the church deaths while the other defendants get shorter terms. Michael meanwhile marries, has a daughter and divorces. Rediscovering his books and notes from the time of his affair, he begins reading them into a tape recorder. He sends the cassette tapes and a tape recorder to Hanna. Eventually she learns to read, and writes back to him.
Michael does not write back or visit, but keeps sending tapes, and in 1988 a prison official (Linda Basset) telephones him to seek his help with Hannah’s transition into society upon her upcoming release. He finds a place for her to live and a job, and finally visits. The night before her release Hannah hangs herself and leaves a note to Michael and a tea tin with cash in it.
Later, Michael travels to New York. He meets Ilana (Lena Olin) and confesses his past relationship with Hanna. He tells her that Hanna was illiterate for most of her life, and that her suicide note told him to give the cash from the tea tin and some money she had in a bank account to Ilana. Ilana tells Michael there is nothing to be learned from the camps. Michael suggests that he donate the money to a organization that combats adult illiteracy, preferably a Jewish one, and she agrees. Ilana keeps the tea tin since it is similar to one stolen from her in Auschwitz.
The film ends with Michael getting back together with his daughter, Julia, at Hanna’s grave and beginning to tell her the story.
Production
In April 1998, Miramax Films acquired the rights to the 1995 German novel The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, and principal photography began in September 2007 immediately after Stephen Daldry was signed to direct the film adaptation and actor Ralph Fiennes was cast into a lead role. Kate Winslet was originally cast as Hanna, but scheduling difficulties led her to leave the film and Nicole Kidman was cast as her replacement. In January 2008, Nicole Kidman left the project, citing her recent pregnancy as the primary reason. She had not filmed any scenes yet, so the studio was able to re-cast Winslet into the lead role without affecting the production schedule.
Filming took place in the cities of Berlin and Goerlitz and was finished in Cologne on July 14th. Filmmakers received US$718,752 from Germany’s Federal Film Board. Overall, the studio has received US$4.1 million from Germany’s regional and federal subsidiaries.
Schlink insisted the film be shot in English, rather than German, as it posed questions about living in a post-genocidal society that went beyond mid-century Germany. Daldry and Hare toured locations from the novel with Schlink, viewed documentaries about that period in German history and read books and articles about women who had served as SS guards in the camps. Hare, who rejected using a voiceover narration to render the long internal monologues in the novel, also changed the ending so that Michael starts to tell the story of Hanna and him to his daughter. “It’s about literature as a powerful means of communication, and at other times as a substitute for communication”, he explained.
The primary cast, all of whom were German besides Fiennes, Olin and Winslet, decided to emulate Kross’s accent, since he had just learned English for the film.
Chris Menges replaced Roger Deakins as cinematographer. One of the film’s producers, Scott Rudin, left the production over a dispute about the release date and has had his name removed from the credit list. Rudin differed with Harvey Weinstein “because he didn’t want to campaign for an Oscar along with “Doubt” and “Revolutionary Road,” which also stars Winslet.” Kate Winslet won best actress for the Academy Awards for “The Reader”, the film she has been awarded a Golden Globe as best supporting actress. Marc Caro writes, “Because Winslet couldn’t get best actress nominations for both movies, the Weinstein Co. shifted her to supporting actress for “The Reader” as a courtesy.”
Reception
Critical reception for the film was positive to mixed, having a 60% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety wrote that the film was well-realized and dramatic, but that it came “across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact.” Manohla Dargis in The New York Times was very critical of the film’s flashback structure and its tendency to treat horrific subjects artistically.
…you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.
Patrick Goldstein, writing in The Los Angeles Times, said “The picture’s biggest problem is that it simply doesn’t capture the chilling intensity of its source material,” and noted that there was a “largely lackluster early reaction” to the film by most film critics.
Ron Rosenbaum was highly critical of the film’s fixation on Hanna’s illiteracy.
“so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of illiteracy—despite the fact that burning 300 people to death doesn’t require reading skills—that some worshipful accounts of the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps because it’s been declared “classic” and “profound”) actually seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of than participating in mass murder… Lack of reading skills is more disgraceful than listening in bovine silence to the screams of 300 people as they are burned to death behind the locked doors of a church you’re guarding to prevent them from escaping the flames. Which is what Hanna did, although, of course, it’s not shown in the film.”
Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter was more generous, concluding the picture was a “well-told coming-of-age yarn” but “disturbing” for raising critical questions about complicity in the Holocaust. He praised Winslet and Kross for providing “gutsy, intense performances”, and noted that Olin and Ganz turn in “memorable appearances.” He wrote that the cinematographers Chris Menges and Roger Deakins lent the film a “fine professional polish”.
The film appeared on several critics’ top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Stephen Farber of The Hollywood Reporter named it the 4th best film of 2008, Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club named it the 8th best film of 2008, and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times put it on his unranked top 20 list and by now (22 feb 2009) she won the oscar award of her acting in movie.
Cast & Credits
- Directed by: Stephen Daldry
- Produced by: Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Scott Rudin (uncredited)
- Written by: David Hare
- Starring: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Alexandra Maria Lara, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz, Thorben Lembke, Hannah Herzsprung, Karoline Herfurth, Burghard Klaußner
- Music by: Nico Muhly
- Cinematography: Chris Menges, Roger Deakins
- Editing by: Claire Simpson
Other Information
- Distributed by: The Weinstein Company
- Release date: December 10, 2008
- Running time: 124 min.
- Country: USA, Germany
- Language: English
- Budget: $32 million
Links
- The Reader Official Website
- The Reader at the Internet Movie Database
- The Reader at Allmovie
- The Reader at Rotten Tomatoes
- The Reader at Box Office Mojo
- The Reader at Metacritic
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