Written by John Shea
The difference between the two comes in motivation and realism. Mickey Rourke's performance is so grounded in reality that it feels little different from a documentary in a lot of ways. Winslet has a juicy character, but one that I can't quite accept as believable, under cutting the whole movie.
Part of the movie is in the late 50s. She plays Hannah Schmitz who we first meet coming to the aid of Michael (David Kross playing the young Michael), a young teen boy who has taken ill. She cleans him up and takes him home after he retches on her doorstep. When he recovers he returns to say thanks and before you know it the two are heavy into a torrid sexual relationship. He is delighted, and really who could blame him? Spending weeks largely naked with Kate Winslet is probably many guys idea of heaven.
The relationship is a bit one sided. He is clearly smitten with her but she holds back quite a bit. She seems to enjoy the sex and having him read to her but seems emotionally detached from the whole thing. Eventually it ends and the movie moves forward a few years to when he is in law school. His professor brings the class to a trial, where several Nazi guards are facing prosecution. One of them is Hannah. Michael is thunderstruck. He can't seem to come to grips with the situation, to the extent that he withholds information that could seriously affect the trial. It's unclear if he can't forgive her for the atrocities she was involved with or for dumping him unceremoniously. Either way, he punishes her by keeping her secret. She can't read.
Now this is where things go off the rails for me. It seems that Hannah joined the SS as a guard because she needed a good job and this was one where she could hide being illiterate. She is always fairly opaque, making her motivations hard to read. Has illiteracy rendered her so uneducated that she does horrible things because she doesn't know better? That's the impression I get and it's one I have a hard time swallowing. A lack of education and a lack of morals are two different things. Certainly ignorance can lead to bad decisions and poorly thought out ideas but Hannah says things that show a mind boggling inability to process information. Is she simply dumb? That doesn't seem right considering what we saw of her affair with Michael.
The movie spans huge chunks of time, following Michael from teens to his fifties. Without getting into the details, there is a devastating effect on both him and Hannah over this time frame that seems out of whack with the scale of their relationship. There are plenty of interesting things here about the generation of Germans that followed World War II and how they react to their recent history. There is the idea of handling forgiveness and assesing personal responsibility as well. But these ideas tend to be pushed aside by the relationship between Hannah and Michael. For my tastes, this unbalances the movie, keeping it from achieving greatness.
Kate Winslet really is superb as Hannah. She plays someone desperately trying to hide a secret and with a warped set of morals that makes her actions and motivations more than a little hard to predict or understand. As plot, this is tough to swallow but as character it makes for an indelible performance. Winslet manages to make it very clear when Hannah is not saying something, whether because she doesn't know what to say or is ashamed to say what she is thinking. It's a performance far more interesting for the many silences than for what she actually says. There is a wealth of information running just under the surface if you know to look for it and Hannah clearly hopes you don't.
Ray Fiennes plays Michael as an adult with that cold detached thing that Ray Fiennes does better than anyone. He does it well but I think I would have preferred something more emotional to try and get some better feel for why Michael behaves the way he does. I know that the theme here is what to say and what not to say but saying just a bit more would have made this a whole lot more satisfying for me.
Monday, 09 February 2009 22:25
The next two movies I review are both ones dominated by a single actor. One is The Wrestler, where Mickey Rourke gives a career performance in a movie completely wrapped around that performance for its structure. The other is The Reader, where Kate Winslet gives a remarkable performance that provides the movie's thrust and drive for the plot.The difference between the two comes in motivation and realism. Mickey Rourke's performance is so grounded in reality that it feels little different from a documentary in a lot of ways. Winslet has a juicy character, but one that I can't quite accept as believable, under cutting the whole movie.
Part of the movie is in the late 50s. She plays Hannah Schmitz who we first meet coming to the aid of Michael (David Kross playing the young Michael), a young teen boy who has taken ill. She cleans him up and takes him home after he retches on her doorstep. When he recovers he returns to say thanks and before you know it the two are heavy into a torrid sexual relationship. He is delighted, and really who could blame him? Spending weeks largely naked with Kate Winslet is probably many guys idea of heaven.
The relationship is a bit one sided. He is clearly smitten with her but she holds back quite a bit. She seems to enjoy the sex and having him read to her but seems emotionally detached from the whole thing. Eventually it ends and the movie moves forward a few years to when he is in law school. His professor brings the class to a trial, where several Nazi guards are facing prosecution. One of them is Hannah. Michael is thunderstruck. He can't seem to come to grips with the situation, to the extent that he withholds information that could seriously affect the trial. It's unclear if he can't forgive her for the atrocities she was involved with or for dumping him unceremoniously. Either way, he punishes her by keeping her secret. She can't read.
Now this is where things go off the rails for me. It seems that Hannah joined the SS as a guard because she needed a good job and this was one where she could hide being illiterate. She is always fairly opaque, making her motivations hard to read. Has illiteracy rendered her so uneducated that she does horrible things because she doesn't know better? That's the impression I get and it's one I have a hard time swallowing. A lack of education and a lack of morals are two different things. Certainly ignorance can lead to bad decisions and poorly thought out ideas but Hannah says things that show a mind boggling inability to process information. Is she simply dumb? That doesn't seem right considering what we saw of her affair with Michael.
The movie spans huge chunks of time, following Michael from teens to his fifties. Without getting into the details, there is a devastating effect on both him and Hannah over this time frame that seems out of whack with the scale of their relationship. There are plenty of interesting things here about the generation of Germans that followed World War II and how they react to their recent history. There is the idea of handling forgiveness and assesing personal responsibility as well. But these ideas tend to be pushed aside by the relationship between Hannah and Michael. For my tastes, this unbalances the movie, keeping it from achieving greatness.
Kate Winslet really is superb as Hannah. She plays someone desperately trying to hide a secret and with a warped set of morals that makes her actions and motivations more than a little hard to predict or understand. As plot, this is tough to swallow but as character it makes for an indelible performance. Winslet manages to make it very clear when Hannah is not saying something, whether because she doesn't know what to say or is ashamed to say what she is thinking. It's a performance far more interesting for the many silences than for what she actually says. There is a wealth of information running just under the surface if you know to look for it and Hannah clearly hopes you don't.
Ray Fiennes plays Michael as an adult with that cold detached thing that Ray Fiennes does better than anyone. He does it well but I think I would have preferred something more emotional to try and get some better feel for why Michael behaves the way he does. I know that the theme here is what to say and what not to say but saying just a bit more would have made this a whole lot more satisfying for me.
