00s Movie Review - The Reader

Director: Stephen Daldry
Genre: Drama/ Romance
Runtime: 124 minutes
Year: 2008
Starring: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Susanne Lothar, Alissa Wilms, Florian Bartholomäi, Friederike Becht, Matthias Habich

Description: Post-WWII Germany: Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, law student Michael Berg (David Kross) re-encounters his former lover (Kate Winslet) as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.

Review: It is 1958. The fifteen-year-old student Michael Berg meets a mysterious middle-aged woman who works as a conductor for the city streetcar. There is something behind this Hanna Schmitz’s grump looks: although she refuses to talk about herself, she likes to listen to Goethe and Doris Lessing. Michael presents the passages to her. Perversity is lurking, but a bizarre form of love emerges from Hanna’s sexual advances. But then suddenly she’s gone. Eight years later, Michael, now a law student, suddenly hears that Hanna is on trial because of her past as a camp executioner for the Nazis.
Although it remains uncomfortable to see the darkest page of the Second World War reduced to emotional films about lost memories and stranded loves, a moral breakthrough sounds from the revival of the Holocaust film in the 2000s. Earlies in 2008, there was “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, after the acclaimed children’s novel with the same title, mainly taught a young generation what the horrors of the Holocaust were. In “The Reader”, the adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s bestseller, Stephen Daldry focuses on a more mature audience with a theme that has remained untouched in Hollywood until 2008: the collective guilt of Germans and a second generation struggling with their parents’ crime.  
The topical but also somewhat transparent themes that Schlink cited in his novel led to a renewed riot about the issue of German guilt. The film, on the other hand, does nothing more than just briefly touching the subject. Heavily set court scenes. What would you have done? It doesn’t really focus on it and ultimately the story has nothing to do with the moral core of Hanna Schmitz’s crimes.
In “The Reader”, the question of crime, punishment and penance also fades because the chosen plot lines mainly want to show insight into the aftermath of a scheming love. Kate Winslet won an Academy Award for her role, when there were better contenders that year. And this is definitely not one of her best performances. The film wants you to sympathize with Hanna’s character. But you simply never do.
To me it remains annoying that Hollywood thinks it can best capture the most horrible and reprehensible crimes with sentiment and beauty.

Rating: 2,5/ 5