Monday, 19 January 2009

The Reader

So which of the Guardian's film critics had it right? Peter Bradshaw, who gave it a mauling and 1 star, or Philip French, who described it as "an exemplary piece of film-making" ? I'm going to hang on the fence, I'm afraid.

Let's start with what works... Kate Winslet, David Kross and Ralph Fiennes all act fantastically well, with Winslet's performance as Hanna, the Nazi concentration camp guard whom Kross' school age Michael Berg has an affair with particularly impressive. With the aid of very heavy make up, she does a good job of playing Hanna both as a thirty-something tram conductor in 1950s Berlin, and as an elderly prisoner some thirty years later.

The film is also fantastically well shot. It's not something I'm usually inclined to notice in a film but here I did. The contrast between the primitive dinginess of Hanna's post-war flat and the bright, optimistic primary colours of Michael's riverside party with his school friends somehow contriving to capture the difference between Germany's dark second world war history and the economically booming powerhouse that was post-war West Germany.

In the end, though, I'm left with the sense that the film doesn't really work. Maybe the flaw lies with David Hare's script, but perhaps its simply that The Reader is too 'difficult' a novel to work as a film. I read it a few years back, and it's not an easy book, in any respect, and defies straightforward explanation. It uses the metaphor of an illicit relationship between a post-war baby-boomer teenager and a 3o-something former SS concentration camp guard to explore the complex and troubled relationship between those who lived under and co-operated with Nazism, and their sons and daughters. It questions both the redemptive power of literature and it's limits. In other words, it's not easy material for turning into a film.

The result is more than a little confused. The deliberate ambiguity around the extent of Hanna's complicity and guilt, which works well in the book, merely leads to confusion in the film. In the end, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that the director was leading us towards seeing her as a victim of, rather than a perpetrator of, war crimes.

There are a couple of more mundane flaws. The first is that I found my suspension of disbelief somewhat hindered by the fact that the film was in English. Here was a film set in Germany, adapted from a German novel, with numerous references to German literature - and yet all of the characters were speaking in English, and Michael's considerable book collection was all in English. After seeing such fantastic (and commercially successful) films as Downfall and The Lives of Others in German, I wonder whether this film might better have been made in Schlink's own tongue. The mix of German actors speaking in English and English actors speaking with German accents jars slightly.

A second problem is that while, with extensive make-up, Winslet's Hanna ages reasonably convincingly over the 30 years or so of the film, 46 year old Fiennes looks less convincing as the 30 year old Michael of the 1970s (though to be fair, he is much better as the older, sadder, wiser Michael of the film's epilogue, set in the mid 1990s.)

In the end, it might well win Oscars, but to my mind it's not a great film. It's diverting, and while it's a bit over-long, it's not an unpleasant watch, but it's too confused and incoherent to really deserve those awards...

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