"Reader" delves into postwar guilt

By Kirk Honeycutt

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "The Reader" is the last project of producers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, both of whom passed away during the film's making.

It's a testament to the kind of productions each was associated with -- films of entertainment, often with stars, that also reach out in terms of situations, themes and settings to embrace larger issues that confront society.

"The Reader" is a well-told coming-of-age yarn about a young boy growing up in postwar West Germany and experiencing his first love affair. But the outreach is to an issue crucial in that country and genuinely disturbing to any viewer. This is the troubling dilemma of Germany's so-called "second generation," which had to come to terms with the Nazi era and a Holocaust perpetuated by parents, teachers and even lovers.

Certainly "The Reader," for all its erotic scenes involving Kate Winslet, presents a difficult marketing challenge. The lively, nonlinear structure imposed by screenwriter David Hare and tight, focussed direction from Stephen Daldry make this an engaging period drama. But German postwar guilt is not the most winning subject matter for the holiday season. The Weinstein Co. release opens December 10, expands Christmas Day and goes national January 9.

"The Reader," based on Bernhard Schlink's controversial German novel, deliberately places a Holocaust perpetrator at the story's focal point. But since we first meet her in an entirely different light, as a kind, loving and passionate woman, it explores the challenges of this second generation in navigating a welter of deeply psychological and morally complex issues.

The film opens in 1995 Berlin, where Ralph Fiennes plays aloof, emotionally numb attorney Michael Berg. We're swiftly conveyed back to 1958, when his younger self (very well played by David Kross) has a chance encounter that will forever affect him. Coming down with what he later learns is scarlet fever, he is helped home by a stranger, Hanna (Winslet). Upon recovering, he looks her up to thank her and finds himself losing his virginity to her. They embark on an affair with its own kind of feverish urgency.

As part of their bedroom rituals, he starts to read to her from books by Mark Twain, Homer and Anton Chekhov. She calls him "Kid," and clearly an "oldness" afflicts her beyond her years. Yet there is a kind of role reversal in his reading to her that allows him to expose her to worlds she never knew.

Then she disappears. Eight years later, as Michael attends a war crimes trial as a law student in Heidelberg, she makes a startling reappearance as a defendant. Michael is shaken to his core by growing evidence that his first love is, by any standard, a monster. But how does one deal with a monster who is a lover? One can only condemn her; but in that condemnation, where lies the process of understanding?