![]() ![]() For me, it was what I perceived as Michael’s cowardice that made me angry. Some readers, such as the majority of my local discussion group, will not be able to get past the age difference of the unconventional relationship. ![]() Reading the book more than once reveals even more. There are many layers and symbols woven through the book, which one continues to unravel long after one has finished. His dilemma, reactions and memories lead the reader into pondering the meaning of good and evil, personal responsibility, fate and love. Many years later he is training as a lawyer and enters the courtroom to find her on trial for activities in WW2. The relationship continues for months, until she suddenly disappears. After a long illness, he returns to thank her, leading to their becoming lovers. The story centers on Hanna, a woman in her thirties, who helps teenage Michael after he becomes sick on his way home from school. What was I expecting, Nora Roberts does post-war Germany? Priestley's "An Inspector Calls" was particularly rich - but he's spotty on film, and while he and Hare enjoyed a suces d'estime with "The Hours," only the fancy, propulsive structure of the narrative prevented Hare's dour sensibility from gumming up the works.Anyone picking up Bernhard Schlink’s novel, as I did, planning on being titillated by the older woman-younger man romance will be blind-sided by the moral complexities of the book. Daldry can be a vibrant stage director - his revival of J.B. The older Michael is portrayed by Ralph Fiennes, who doesn't have much to express except dashing reserve and reserved, vaguely troubled dash. The problem is that the characters' give-and-take, with each other or within themselves, lacks the edges and contradictions of real life. "The Reader" is interested in the psyche and the fate of one (fictional) example and her impact on the life of a boy on the verge of manhood. So many thousands of Hitler's willing executioners remade or buried their former selves after the war. As for the fate of the 300 Jewish camp prisoners that led to Hanna's trial, well, that's another Holocaust film, not this one. Chronologically scrambled by Hare, the story becomes a paean to the glories of literacy and a facile inquiry into collective German guilt. Even though Winslet can adjust, brilliantly and almost imperceptibly, any character's emotional temperature, Hanna remains a knotty abstraction, not a dimensional being. Lawrence to her, always before intercourse, never after. Hanna and Michael spend many stolen hours together, as he reads Homer and D.H. Adapted by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, Hare's colleague on the portentous film version of "The Hours," "The Reader" risks fraudulence the second Winslet's Hanna scoops up the ailing Michael (he has scarlet fever in the film, hepatitis in the book), points to the tub in her stern little flat (beautifully lighted by two ace cinematographers, Roger Deakins and Chris Menges) and flatly declares, "Take off your clothes." Visually, the film doesn't feel lived-in or textured it's all neat and tidy and on-the-nose. Even in the scenes dominated by Winslet, and in a strong late appearance by Lena Olin as a camp survivor, you never quite believe the way anything unfolds. I'm afraid it needed a different set of interpreters to make any emotional sense of it onscreen. Told, coolly, from Michael's perspective, the novel was hugely popular as well as controversial worldwide and an Oprah's Book Club selection besides. She stands before him, a shell of a woman, still laden with secrets. One day at a war crimes trial of female Auschwitz guards, he hears the name of his former lover cited along with several other women. Years later Michael, played by young German actor David Kross, is a Heidelberg law student. ![]() With a heavy gait and the eye of a sorrowful predator, Winslet portrays Hanna Schmitz, who disappears from young Michael's life as mercurially as she entered it. ![]()
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