Movie Review: The Reader

We are the heirs of histories not our own. In The Reader, this concept is drawn out in a two-hour film that has been nominated for the Academy's best picture award for 2009. The film has a seriousness that matches the story of the film: in late-1950s Germany, Michael Berg, a fifteen-year-old boy, has an affair with an austere, emotionally distant adult woman named Hanna Schmitz. After the summerlong affair ends, both go on their way, only to be reconnected later in difficult circumstances. Michael is a young law student observing a trial of female Nazi guards, one of whom is Hanna. After she is convicted, their relationship develops as both try to understand themselves, their love, and the irreparable finality of history.

We hear that "the past is prologue," or a prediction, often -- how events of the past live on to the present. The story is told in at least five time periods from 1957 to 1995. The film is set and was shot in Germany, but the dialogue is in English. We take on the perspective of Michael Berg through these years as he matures and attempts to understand how he could love a woman who worked for the Nazis, and then understand the depths of her shame. Subtitles show the viewer the time changes, and as different scenes intersperce through different time periods with smart transitions, we begin to see how significant emotions and events may never leave us.

Some critics have reacted strongly against The Reader, suggesting that the film unfairly uses the post-Nazi German context manipulatively. If there is a knock on this film, it is the film's literary seriousness; The Reader film is based on a novel by the same name written by German lawyer Bernhard Schlink. I find this snipe unfair because The Reader expands how we understand the complex inheritance not only of atrocities like the Holocaust, but also how human psychology works, with each past experience affecting the present. The past is still happening.

The title The Reader comes from Hanna's illiteracy: as a lonely person, when she befriends someone, she has them read her books. One powerful moment is in the courtroom when Michael learns that Hanna had Jewish concentration camp inmates read to her, but would then expel them to their deaths when she became too emotionally attached to them. This parallels the narrative of the first third of the film, when young Michael comes to sexual understanding with the adult Hanna and reads great works of literature to her, but she disappears out of his life.

It did not feel like a two-hour film. The first third deals with the emotional swells of the affair; at one moment, the schoolboy Michael hears a teacher lecture, "Western literature deals with the hiding of information, whether love, emotion, or death" (paraphrase). The second third follows Michael as a law student witnessing the prosecution of his former lover Hanna. The final third finds Hanna living in prison and the now-adult Michael sending her tapes of him reading great works of literature, in effect teaching Hanna literacy. The finish is not a cliffhanger, but the motifs (or recurring elements) of the film are put to great use throughout and especially in the conclusion.

One character says, "If you want catharsis, go to the theater, read a book. Do not go to Auschwitz." The Reader establishes the idea that the camps were misery factories for prisoner, guard, and executioner. While the quote would seem to put the ideas of the film under erasure, the effect of this film is powerful. The Reader is analytical instead of entertaining, and literary instead of edge-of-your-seat. Like any great film, the effect of its ideas are slow and lasting instead of immediate. This parallels the film's central idea, and the problem of Holocaust history as survivors pass away: instead of history being forgotten, we are left with more and more questions for an inheritance we can make little sense of. The Reader puts a human face on the complexities of history.