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The Reader

Starring: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Lena Olin

Director: Stephen Daldry

Category: III

The Reader features the towering, Oscar-winning performance of Kate Winslet, which is matched by an impressive turn from her on-screen partner, David Kross. Then there's director Stephen Daldry's mise-en-scene, which spawns a brooding, melancholic atmosphere, enhanced by tasteful cinematography from Roger Deakins and Chris Menges.

Add to this the inspiration for the film, the book of the same name by Bernhard Schlink, which explores how Germans growing up right after the end of the second world war face up to the calamitous misdeeds of their forebears during the Nazi era.

Reason suggests that such a mix of elements would yield a remarkable piece of filmmaking. The Reader, however, is anything but - and the film's major shortcoming stems from how it prizes intellectual aptitude over moral goodness.

It's all very well that the film revolves around a former Auschwitz warden who feels more shame about not being able to read than for her role in the awful deaths of innocent Jews under her charge. (When asked what lessons she has learned from her incarceration for her part in the Holocaust, Hanna Schmitz - played by Winslet, above right - says, 'I learned to read.')

What's questionable about The Reader, however, is that Hanna's views are not exactly challenged, as while characters around her express bemusement and dismay over her inability to understand her misdeeds. The film actually includes episodes that affirm Hanna's warped social values: near its end, when Hanna's erstwhile young lover Michael (Ralph Fiennes, who plays the character when he's older) meets Holocaust survivor Ilana (Lena Olin) to apologise on Hanna's behalf, Ilana chides him by saying that he should look for his catharsis in literature and theatre, bizarrely mirroring Hanna's belief that it's high culture that saves souls, not moral introspection.

There's a lot of flitting back and forth in time in The Reader, but what actually happened when Hanna was a guard is only hinted at during her trial. In fact, the flashbacks are more dedicated to the illicit relationship she has with the teenage Michael (Kross). In between the pair's intensely carnal relationship (during which Michael reads to Hanna) and the film's denouement, Hanna's past is laid bare and her twisted morality exposed during her courtroom interrogation.

There's also the constant discussion Michael - who first attends Hanna's proceedings as a law student - has with his classmates and professor (Bruno Ganz) about moral relativism and collective guilt.

These are certainly intended to serve as the film's cerebral moments, which only underscores the sense that for all its technical mastery, The Reader is unable to do justice to, or adequately make sense of, some of the darkest aspects of human nature.

The Reader opens today

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