The annual
end-of-year outpouring of awards-baiting dramas comes in two distinct flavors
this year: low-def, gritty, achingly sincere miserablist indies, and
high-toned, expensive, achingly serious miserablist studio fare. The Bernhard
Schlink novel adaptation The Reader falls
firmly into the latter camp; everything about it is warmly lit and coldly
calculated. Even the sex scenes are tastefully posed in ways that have more to
do with an idealized portrait of passion than actual sex. Viewers should expect
no less from Steven Daldry, who with the Best Director nominees The
Hours and Billy Elliot, gave
prestige-pic fans two other staid, swelling book adaptations suitable for
framing.
But while The
Reader could stand to be more lively and
lived-in, it's nonetheless a supremely well-acted, gorgeously shot story that
quietly dodges many of the common pitfalls of the Holocaust movie. In
particular, it has little to do with the vastness of the tragedy, and
everything to do with the disjunctions between generations in all eras, not
just momentous ones.
David Kross
stars as a callow 15-year-old who falls into a sudden love affair with snappish
tram attendant Kate Winslet in 1958 Germany. He's naïve and unformed; even a
normal relationship would be a mystery to him, let alone their trap-filled maze
of sudden tensions and forced distances. Still, Winslet answers his infatuation
with a growing warmth once he begins reading to her. The trysts end as abruptly
as they begin; far later, when Kross encounters Winslet in a new setting and
learns about her role in the war, he struggles with the conflict between love,
revulsion, and perceived duty. Interspersed scenes set in 1995 Berlin, with
Kross' character played by Ralph Fiennes, show how fully that struggle has
shaped his adult life.
The Reader is a deeply novelistic movie, full of undercurrents
and messages, particularly about the way young people have to distance
themselves from the authority figures of their youth in order to create their
own identities, even though by the time they make their breaks, it's already
too late to clear off all the imprinting those authority figures left on them.
But Kross and Winslet's intense performances and Daldry's deliberately placid
control of tone make the material work as a love (and hate) story as well as a
metaphor. Passion can't be meticulously, thoughtfully crafted, but everything
that can be is beautifully done here.