"The Reader" is about damage, betrayal of unimaginable breadth and depth, and the fantasy of undying love. David Kross plays Michael as a youth, Ralph Fiennes plays Michael as an adult, and Kate Winslet plays Hanna.
NOTE: There are spoilers in this review. I've typed in an alert. If you haven't seen the movie, you may not want to read the spoilers. The review before the alert is sufficient to let you know about the movie if you haven't seen it.
Michael's damage is shown in the very first scene, as the elder Michael deals rather poorly with a woman who has slept over. The damage is caused by the statutory rape of Michael, with his joyous consent, in the summer of 1958 when he was fifteen; he was the willing seductee of Hanna, a woman not quite old enough to be his mother. She was in her mid-thirties, if my math is correct. Young Michael glories in his sexual awakening, but as we see the damage in his later life, we understand that the effects go beyond Michael, wrecking the lives of everyone who loves him. The damage is not only to Michael but to his daughter, the succeeding generation. We wonder where it will end.
It is good to see the movie treat the fifteen year old Michael as a fifteen year old: Michael has no understanding of Hanna and what is going on in the adult world. Hanna makes him cry, a perfectly fifteen year old response to his hurt bewilderment. For awhile, they settle into a routine. He reads classic works to her, then they make love. Michael is the reader.
Hanna keeps herself secret from Michael, begrudgingly telling him her name, calling him "kid," berating him for following her to her place of work. She moves from her apartment with no notice, and Michael has no way to find her. His first betrayal. The damage to the young Michael comes to the fore, and we see his inability to have a relationship with his family and with girls his age. As time goes by, we learn that Michael (still played by Kross) goes to law school in the Sixties, fails to relate to his classmates, and is in a seminar with advanced students. The indications are that Michael is quite intelligent, even among his law school classmates.
As part of his seminar, his class sits in on a trial. The proceedings bring Michael to a shocking realization concerning Nazi Germany and Germany in the Sixties. It may have been that the people murdering the jews were ordinary people with ordinary lives, people who had families and were loved. If these were ordinary Germans who became monsters, their betrayal of morals, standards, and humanity far exceeds Hanna's betrayal of Michael and his budding love for her. The quandary of how to understand family members who were loving parents at home and murderers and worse at work is beyond Michael's (and our) intellectual powers.
These betrayals wreck Michael's life. We watch the older Michael, who has failed in his emotional life but succeeded as a lawyer, as he tries to rebuild his relationship with his daughter. Our last view of him shows Michael beginning for the first time to tell his daughter of his affair with Hanna and all that followed, and we have some hope that he can heal himself from his deep, terrible wounds.
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As part of his law school seminar, the class sits in on a trial of extermination camp guards, and Michael is shocked to find that one defendant is his Hanna. His shock turns to horror as he learns that her betrayal of him is nothing compared to the psychopathic betrayals she recounts in court as matter of factly as if she were deciding what to buy for lunch. (In fact, we have seen that ordering lunch is for her a matter of greater anguish.)
During the trial, witnesses recount the horrors they suffered in Auschwitz and its work camps, where Hanna was a guard. Hanna's testimony leaves the viewer stumped as to whether she is borderline mentally incompetent or completely and utterly immoral. References are made to Germans knowing what was happening in the Jewish extermination camps and blindly ignoring it, so my guess is that the issue of her competence/immorality is a broader question: can we all be so willfully bind? So mute? And there is the deeper issue faced in Germany of dealing with a family member who was involved in the Holocaust. How could Michael (or anyone) have loved such a person, been blind to whatever was within Hanna (or any family member) that allowed her depraved behavior. How does Michael account for that now?
Michael realizes from circumstances at the trial that Hanna is illiterate and ashamed of it. Rather than admit she cannot read and write, she falsely confesses to having written a report which places her in charge of the guards. Michael faces the question of bringing her illiteracy to her lawyer's knowledge, and he chooses to keep silent. When she alone of the six defendants receives a life sentence, Michael bears some responsibility for its severity. He has been mute, when he has information that could have lessened her sentence.
During the film, we shuttle occasionally back and forth between Kross and Fiennes as Michael, and we're given title cards with the year we're currently seeing. This is a distraction I wish they'd found some way to avoid. Eventually, we get to Michael as the adult, played by Fiennes, and we see the results not only of Hanna's betrayal of his immature love, but of her moral betrayal of him as the lover of a woman who was his idealized fantasy love and who is a monster.
Time passes, and eventually Michael comes to terms with the reality of his fantasy love, and he begins to dictate books into a cassette recorder, which he mails to Hanna in her prison. I believe this is an attempt not to relive the happy past but to recapture a happier part of it; however, there is no redemption, not even any forgiveness. The attempt falls flat. As in the real world, there can be no forgiveness for the Holocaust. The Holocaust is irredeemably evil.
His idealized love for the idealized woman is not merely shattered. His fantasy is blasted, dis-integrated, atomized. For Michael, the only recourse is to end the fantasy which has prevented his emotional growth as a person. At the end of the film, we see that Michael has accepted what happened and has decided to return to life however belatedly. And it is belated indeed. At last Michael shoulders the responsibility for the heavy burden he placed on himself and others.
This is an exceptional movie that deals with adult themes and problems in all their messiness, and there is no rainbow at the end. Not a happy ending, but an ending with promise of things to come. A promise absent not only from Michael's life for decades but from the lives of those who loved him.