The Last Movie I Saw

The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes and David Kross (the latter two play the same character at different points in his life), was, to me, a well-done but ulitmately disappointing movie. As the poster above suggests, it turns on the idea of keeping secrets, and the unintended consequences of doing so. It's an interesting idea, and the story, as it unfolds, is never less than compelling. But at the same time, the narrative creates what seemed to me a kind of phony duality, or mirroring, between the two protagonists (Winslet and Kross/Fiennes) that suggests some kind of moral equivalency for acts that are considerably different in scale and impact. To achieve this equivalence, the story necessarily reduces the two secrets down, to view their primary effect on the individuals whose story we are told, and in so doing generates a degree of sympathy that is, if not wholly misplaced, than certainly slanted by the attractiveness of the leads in portraying these particular characters.

Since this film has garnered a number of Academy Awards nominations, you probably already know that its story turns on the Winslet character's involvement in the death camps of the Holocaust. That character's ultimate culpibility in what happened there is open to question, and key evidence that could partly exonerate her becomes a shared secret for reasons that I found a bit murky. The effect of maintaining that secret is devastating in different ways to the parties involved, and as suggested above, although these consequences are apparently meant to mirror one another, it's difficult to see how those lasting penalties are, or even should be, equal.

I know that some have criticized the film for making a death camp guard essentially a sympathetic figure, and I see their point. But I can't think of any reason provided in the story to feel sympathy for that character except in that she's played by a star of Kate Winslet's magnitude. Her behavior throughout often betrays a selfishness and even meanness that could be read as the results of her own harrowing moral compromises; but in fact we are given little reason to belief that it is anything but her nature. And if that is the case, the guilt felt by the Kross/Fiennes character-- the only victim that we actually see being victimized by that selfishness and meanness-- at her fate is understandable but hardly sympathetic.

Unlike the more modest The Wrestler, which I wrote about in my previous post, The Reader seems like a self-important movie, tackling big issues, but in a manner that balances the moral scales unfairly. Despite its obvious positive qualities in terms of production values and acting, it left me felling that it's reach wasn't quite sufficient to its grasp.