"The Reader" a movie by Stephen Daldry

First posted: 08 september 2009

I have watched, the last February, “The Reader” by Stephen Daldry. It didn’t received enough advertising and not great acclaim from italian critics, but I don’t agree with them: in my opinion this is a film not to be missed by cinemas lovers. 


The trailer, deliberately, doesn’t show the real development of the plot but some simple flashes of the first sequences, in particular, to underline the title “The Reader”. In fact, the movie faces a very sensitive subject, not about love as many have said and thought, but about the simplicity of an uneducated woman, her inability not to understand the SS corps who she had chosen to belong to and the way in which, after war, the German “leaders” have tried to make their own faults to fall over the low ranks of the army. 


The whole plot revolves around the figure of this woman, played by Kate Winslet, who asks her lover Michael (David Kross in the first half of the film, Ralph Fiennes in the second part) to read a few books aloud. She refuses the well-deserved promotion at work, because it stands for a desk job, and she decides to join the new SS corps. The focus, then, shifts to the life of the boy (she abandons him to join into the army) who dedicates to law studies. A professor, of a course that Michael attends to, decides to bring his few students to a trial intented against Nazi crimes perpetrated against Jews. Here, the boy will recognize the woman who he had his first relationship with, among the defendants. 


The sensitivity of the film director leads us through a dimension beyond the fault, obvious, that the Nazis had, to come to an attempt of understanding the soul of an illiterate woman who, ashamed of an educational lack, lays on all the obscenities committed, even by others, without seeing that. She only did the orders that they imposed her. To the question: “Why did you bring people to death?” She replies, “because there was no place in the fields, and we had to create places for the people that were coming, what should we have done otherwise?” and to the question: “By which criteria did you decided who to bring to death?” she replies: “the older women because they were not able to work and we needed healthy people”. The film plays, at this stage, around to the ignorance of judges and the public, present at the trial, about the uneducation of the women and the belief that she’s only a monster to remove. Now, it arises, from this situation, an ethical question for Michael to overcome: “Should he tell or not what he noticed, that is the fact she is unable to read?” because this small detail, in part, could clear the situation and free her from accusations. 


The hidden theme line, which the film is based upon, brilliantly traced and managed by the director, shifts our focus on the humanity of the characters and their fragility, and it gives up offering us a different view point (skipping the black and white scheme of things). The director also doesn’t care too much about the historical context, in order to portray a situation, not deeply rotted in the contingent events. Without being able to know what the characters may think, however, we’re feeling the sensation of understanding them and, during the film progression, without realizing it, we see how easy it was for us to relate with a character so simple and, at the same time, so complex as Kate Winslet’s. Although we’re conscious of her mistake, we can get aware that she fully belongs to the human kind (with her qualities and faults) and she doesn’t symbolize or represent the conventional archetype and prejudice related to the “SS” fanatics or things like that. So she shouldn’t work (in our collective imagination) as a scapegoat for the expiation of nazi crimes. 


Actually, in my personal view, in this movie the main subjects to focus on aren’t love or justice. There’s no catharsis or superficial triumph (i mean that kind of triumph that covers and conceal the emptiness of useless conventions, social matters, dominant values etc.); the main topic is the dedication (of the director and of the public) to a dramatic, tragical figure, that is the key axis of a plot inspired by the pleasure to tell a story without mediations and compromises. So, for a while, the dangerous chance to forget such serious matters and facts won’t be able to steal our civil conscience and human awareness.