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Kate Winslet adalah salah satu aktris terbaik di generasinya. Dan hal itu ia tunjukkan bukan hanya sekali, namun dua kali sepanjang tahun 2008 lalu. Setelah performanya yang sangat, sangat menakjubkan sebagai April Wheeler, seorang istri yang depresi akan pernikahan yang dijalaninya, di Revolutionary Road, Winslet kembali tampil sangat, sangat mengagumkan sebagai Hanna Schmitz, seorang wanita penjaga kamp Nazi yang terlibat percintaan terlarang dengan seorang pemuda di bawah umur, dalam film karya sutradara Stephen Daldry, The Reader.

Sebagai sebuah film yang berlatar belakang holocaust, The Reader mampu memberikan suatu sisi pandang lain bagi penonton mengenai orang-orang yang terlibat di balik kekejaman Nazi. Bagaimana tidak, di film ini, Winslet, sebagai Schmitz, mampu memberikan sebuah penggambaran kalau seorang anggota Nazi bukanlah seorang yang seperti selama ini digambarkan oleh kebanyakan film berlatar holocaust lainnya. Bahkan, begitu hebatnya akting Winslet, mungkin sebagian akan menganggap kalau film ini cenderung akan merubah pandangan sebagian orang mengenai kekejaman Nazi, kalau para tentara dan anggota Nazi hanyalah sekelompok orang yang terjebak untuk melakukan sebuah tindakan kekejaman tanpa mengetahui apa yang sebenarnya terjadi.

Lihat bagaimana karakter wajah Winslet menunjukkan emosi hati karakter Hanna Schmitz saat disidang atas segala perbuatannya ketika bergabung di Nazi. Perlu kualitas akting prima seorang aktris papan atas untuk dapat membuat para penonton merasa iba pada seorang karakter “antagonis” yang telah membiarkan sekelompok orang terperangkap di dalam gereja yang terbakar. Dan Kate Winslet mampu melakukannya.

Sayangnya, Winslet menjadi satu-satunya hal yang akan membuat penonton tetap mengikuti The Reader. Di luar daripada itu, Daldry cenderung dapat dikatakan “gagal” untuk membawa atmosfer kelam novel The Reader, yang seharusnya mampu dapat meninggalkan suatu perasaan galau di hati para penontonnya ketika selesai menonton film ini. Hasilnya, selain kesan akan penampilan Winslet, penonton cenderung akan merasa kalau hingga akhir film, The Reader belum mencapai puncak cerita.

Terlepas daripada itu, akting para cast di film ini harus diberikan perhatian lebih. Selain penampilan Winslet yang luar biasa, akting aktor muda David Kross, yang berperan sebagai Michael Berg muda, juga mampu menyaingi akting para seniornya di film ini. Didukung sinematografi yang indah karya Chris Menges dan Roger Deakins, setidaknya The Reader masih mampu menunjukkan kualitas atas seorang Stephen Daldry.

Rate: 4 / 5

This film is so affecting. I find myself feeling sorry for a woman who’s actions are questionable and I end up not knowing what I should feel/think. But I can’t help but feel for this woman. Obviously Kate Winslet gives a tremendous performance. She really embodies her character so well. Ralph Fiennes is really fantastic too. The surprise performance of the film though, comes from David Kross. He’s a superb young actor that I will be keeping a look out for in future films. This film looks stunning but that’s no surprise considering the incredible Roger Deakins was DP. Also I’m pleased to say that this film has a fantastic score. All in all this is an incredible film that has touched me deeply.

What is guilt? I believe this is the central question behind Stephen Daldry’s new film The Reader. Based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink, the story asks its audience what a true monster is. If you are doing your job, afflicted by a handicap that others will use against you, can you be held responsible for your actions if your own demise would be the result of standing against orders? Should you be held to blame for not killing yourself once you found out the bigger picture of that small task you were forced to participate in? If you know a secret, one that could exonerate someone from being found guilty of murder, should you help her even though you know she’s accepted her guilt despite being unable to stop it? What if that person was someone you loved? There is some heavy material thrown about in the second half of this film, emotions run high and people must make decisions concerning some very dire situations. One thing is for sure, though, once that decision is made, no matter which side of the fence you fall on, some shred of guilt, some feeling of remorse, is inevitably going to follow you around for the rest of your life. This is what we call being human, because as Bruno Ganz’s Professor Rohl says, “our justice is governed by laws, not morals.” It doesn’t matter whether something was right or wrong, it’s whether it was legal or illegal. Unfortunately our souls don’t work that way.

As said, these moral quandaries crop up in the brilliantly paced and constructed second half of the film. The power involved in the characters’ actions all weigh heavy on those they touch. Perhaps the weight would not feel as palpable without the events of the first act, but either way, that portion of the film is too light and innocuous. We learn about young Michael Berg’s, (a wonderful turn by David Kross, who is the true star of the film), affair with an older woman named Hanna Schmitz. This woman is very troubled and in a state of constant flux where her emotions are concerned. She loves Berg, but can never quite allow herself to fully commit to that feeling, her past continuously nagging at the back of her head, remembering what it was she used to do with those who read to her. Kate Winslet’s performance as Hanna is quite good, but like the film itself, doesn’t come into its own until the second act, when all the secrets finally become uncovered.

It is a good beginning, the unabashed love of a young 15 year old and his first sexual partner. He becomes her orator of stories and partner in romance, but they both know it could never last. School would be commencing and Berg would see the young girls his age, ever comparing them to Hanna, and her manifesting his feelings with her own jealousy, knowing that she must let him go … this time sending herself away rather than those she “befriended” of her past, those she sent off to whatever fate awaited them. Whether this violation became so deeply rooted in the boy, I’m not sure, but when he goes off to law school and crosses paths with his first love again, this time as she awaits charges of Nazi war crimes, he is torn on what is morally correct. It becomes his obligation to let the truth come out, despite the activities she partook in during the Holocaust. According to the law, he must divulge the information for justice, but his moral compass may not be able to do so.

The story truly is wonderfully acted and directed, pulling at the audience’s emotions and engaging them throughout. However, while the second half is the most intriguing and resonant, it also contains the one activity that I found abhorrent. Now older, Michael Berg is played by Ralph Fiennes, a lawyer, recently divorced and with a daughter. His journey back home, to his mother that has all but given up on him as a distant figure unable to open up to those that love him, becomes one of returning memories. Discovering the books he once read to Hanna almost two decades earlier, the guilt of what he didn’t do makes him set upon a mission to right that wrong. But the way in which he does so is really quite wrong to me. He seems to condemn her for what she did still and only creates cassettes of stories to send her to assuage his own selfish need for forgiveness. He never appears to care about her, because if he did, he would have made different choices in that courtroom years before. Berg shows the selfishness that followed him the entire story and really got me thinking that maybe he was a worse human being than Hanna. It’s an interesting dynamic to be sure, one that subverts the somewhat “touching” conclusion the filmmakers seem to want to attempt.

The Reader is an interesting look at German guilt and the people’s need to place blame on others for the Holocaust in order to somehow absolve their own indifference of doing nothing when they themselves knew what was going on. One of Berg’s classmates gets the whole issue correct in a little tirade about the absurdity of the trial. Here they all were, guilty themselves of knowing what went on in the thousands of camps, yet putting on trial only six women because a survivor, (interesting to see Lena Olin play a mother and daughter—the beauty of a film spanning decades), wrote a book fingering them. Just as Germany needed to place blame, so did Michael Berg. Rather than put it on his own shoulders though, like Hanna eventually selflessly does, he decides to side with the masses, sitting back silently and then trying in earnest to deal with his eventual guilt, not to apologize to the person he let down, but to somehow forgive himself. It is quite the despicable act and I’m not sure if that was the filmmakers’ intent, however, that is the lasting impression it left on me.

The movie begins in 1958. I didn’t really know the story before hand and based on the trailer I expected the plot to be different. For some reason I thought the whole thing started earlier and that the boy had the affair with Winslet’s character before WWII, then following the war he saw her on trial and was surprised to find she had been an SS officer. Then later he finally admits he had the affair. I guess my history was a little off and I wasn’t paying enough attention to the ages of the character played by Fiennes and Kross in the trailer.

The movie is about a long term relationship, a nontraditional long term relationship. A high school teen, Michael, meets an older woman, Hannah, and a lustful affair begins. It’s a very European-ly open approach to sexuality. But it’s not all about sex. He enjoys literature and she enjoys having him expressively read to her. They never talk about her background. Well she eventually leaves town and he never gets over her. Of all coincidences, in the late 60’s, he is in law school and she and five other SS women guards are on trial for their war crimes. This trial seems more realistic than Judgment at Nuremberg. Michael is shocked when he sees Hannah on trial. He is disgusted by what the Nazis did but because he knows Hannah personally he cannot settle on the fact that she is inherently evil and perhaps more at fault than the other women. Michael puts the pieces together and realizes the shame that Hannah is hiding for being illiterate. He has a chance to possibly lessen her sentence but let’s it pass. Through his fear he let’s her serve a sentence that is perhaps too harsh for her crime.

He gets married, has a kid, gets divorced, has problems with his family, and in a mid-life crisis another decade later thinks about the affair again. He decides to reconnect with Hannah distantly by recording himself reading on cassette tapes and mailing the tapes to the jail. All of a sudden the movie becomes a good advertisement for using talking books from your local library. It’s always been about good literature, but now more explicitly becomes about literacy. They share books on tape for another decade though Michael has never been very open with anyone, especially his daughter. There aren’t a lot of answers in this film, just a lot of questions to make you think. What lessons are learned while someone spends life in prison? Does redemption mean learning a certain lesson or is it possible that something like learning to read for an adult is an act of redemption? And what of forgiveness?