A positive review from Variety

Sober intelligence goes only so far in crafting an effective bigscreen version of the international bestseller "The Reader." German author Bernhard Schlink's succinct, widely admired 1995 novel, which parts company with most Holocaust literature by placing a perpetrator, not a victim, at the story's center, uses a late-1950s affair between a former concentration camp guard and a teenager half her age to explore both generations' difficulty in coming to terms with German war guilt. Stephen Daldry's film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact. Classy package will appeal to upscale specialized auds and the bookish set but pic will have trouble crossing over to the general public Stateside. Offshore prospects look stronger.

Crisscrossing narrative lines that were laid out chronologically in the novel, David Hare's astringent screenplay dispenses gradations of accountability across the decades, beginning with Nazi functionaries who might well have been just "doing their jobs" to members of the "second generation" of the postwar period who had to decide how to react to and judge their elders. The intense sexual relationship serves as a simple, effective metaphor for the elemental generational link, as well as for the shame and uncertainty of how to deal with the fallout.

A chance meeting and an act of kindness lead to a first tango in Neustadt between Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a cold, severe but nonetheless attractive woman in her mid-30s who collects tram fares, and 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross), a bright, well-built student who lives with his middle-class family. Transforming with startling but convincing rapidity from an uncertain teen into a ****y young man, Michael begins dropping by Hanna's flat every day after school for his sentimental education, which is illustrated by Daldry judiciously but with plenty of nudity.

Title stems from Hanna's request that Michael read to her after or, preferably, before their physical exertions. His selections stick to the classics: "The Odyssey," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Chekhov, for starters. When the "kid," as Hanna always calls him, launches into "Lady Chatterley's Lover," she deems it "disgusting" before instructing him to continue reading. Michael takes Hanna on a country outing one day, writes a poem about her and is sufficiently smitten to rebuff the attentions of even his most attractive female classmates.

But one day, Hanna is gone, her flat emptied out. Story proper then jumps eight years to 1966, when Michael is a law student under the tutelage of Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz). When their class attends the trial of several middle-aged women who worked as SS guards at concentration camps during the war, one of them, to Michael's horror, is Hanna.

Michael tells no one of his personal connection; in fact, we have previously heard the older incarnation of Michael (Ralph Fiennes), who's become a lawyer, tell his daughter (Hannah Herzsprung), "I'm aware I wasn't always open with you. I'm not open with anyone."

As the trial wears on, however, his fear of revelation begins to tear him up inside, as he possesses some information that could help Hanna's defense. Thus are the attitudes of younger Germans toward Nazi crimes in which they had no direct involvement held up for scrutiny, as part of the necessarily gradual course of processing the truth, reconciling the generations and moving ahead as individuals and a nation.

Fiennes' middle-aged Michael, who is seen early on trying to connect with his daughter, comes to the fore in the latter stages as the Michael-Hanna drama plays out its final act in an ironic manner that speaks to the potential of rehabilitation and never-too-late education. One of the film's best scenes is a sort-of postscript, in which Michael goes to New York City to visit a wealthy, stylish woman (Lena Olin) who wrote a book with her mother about surviving the camp and the subsequent conflagration where Hanna exercised authority. Interchange between Fiennes and Olin has a snap and electricity missing elsewhere despite dedicated efforts across the board.

A central problem with "The Reader" as a film is that one can never look inside the character of Hanna. Her life and behavior are invariably assessed from the outside -- what she represents to Michael, the way the court and history take stock of her actions -- but never by her. In fact, she denies that her own self-evaluation is of any importance. "It doesn't matter what I feel, it doesn't matter what I think," she insists when asked about wartime atrocities. "The dead are still dead."

Winslet supplies a haunting shell to this internally decimated woman, one who can perhaps momentarily escape from her shame through sex but for whom there is no past she can possibly face and no future to anticipate. She and Kross enact the intimate scenes with impressive delicacy and credible desire, and the young German actor, who has rounder, fleshier features than Fiennes but still manages the match, shows confidence and promise (much is made in the press materials about how the production shut down until his 18th birthday before embarking upon the sex scenes). Fiennes deftly invests the grown-up Michael with an emotional limp, and the decision to have all the actors speak English with a softly suggestive German accent works pretty well.

Supporting cast and locations have been smartly chosen, and the modern Germany of the later scenes contrasts sharply with the Old World hangover look of the '50s. Score by Nico Muhly is supple, unusual and superbly supportive.

Film looks splendid, pretty much a given when both Chris Menges and Roger Deakins are credited. Reportedly, Deakins prepared the picture and began shooting, mostly with the Fiennes material. But when the production halted for a while during the writers' strike, Deakins moved on to "Doubt" and Menges took over as cinematographer when lensing recommenced.

The late producing partners Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack receive a special "in loving memory" dedication. Another producer, Scott Rudin, removed his name from the film a couple of months ago due to disputes with Harvey and Bob Weinstein over rushing to finish it before year's end.

Saw it last night and thought it was very good. Excellent performance by Kate Winslet who does some of her best work here. Its a very internal character and I have to say she has very few lines in the film and I think I agree with Harvey Weinstein to push her for the supporting actress Oscar. Its very borderline between lead and supporting and because her character is so buttoned up and does not express herself with many words I have no problem with her going supporting. David Kross the 15 yr old who has sexual relations with Hana(Kate's character) is a real find. I thought he was excellent as well and really his character is the true lead of the movie. Ralph Fiennes plays him as an older man and while he is good his role and screen time is quite limited. Kross and Winslet are the real standouts here. Stephan Daldry does an excellent job of direction and I wish he worked more. The script by David Hare while rather simple in nature is precise. Lena Olin has a small but effective part at the end of the film. Overall I think its a well done well acted, directed and produced film.

Grade B+

quote:

Originally posted by Miss America:
... Excellent performance by Kate Winslet who does some of her best work here. Its a very internal character and I have to say she has very few lines in the film and I think I agree with Harvey Weinstein to push her for the supporting actress Oscar. Its very borderline between lead and supporting and because her character is so buttoned up and does not express herself with many words I have no problem with her going supporting...

so happy to hear this. I don't want people to talk about a category fraud.

A mixed review from Andrew Sarris in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER...

Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, from a screenplay by David Hare, based on the semi-autobiographical novel The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink, has lost much of the emotional power of the book, which was published in 1995, translated into 40 other languages and became the first German novel to top the New York Times’ best-seller list. The problem with the film arises from a miscalculation on the part of Mr. Daldry, and his screenwriter, Mr. Hare, which involves breaking up the linear narrative of the novel into flash-forwards and flashbacks over a period of 30 years. What remains intact from the book is the emotional and carnal relationship in post–World War II Germany between 15-year-old Michael Berg, played by David Kross, and 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz, played by 33-year-old Kate Winslet.

Eight years after Hanna has suddenly disappeared from Michael’s life, he sees her again as a defendant in a gruesome war-crimes trial while he is a student in law school. He is so profoundly shocked by the revelations at the trial that he does not venture to see her again until her life sentence is commuted after 20 years. Ralph Fiennes plays the 46-year old Michael Berg, and though he has only one scene in person with Ms. Winslet in old-age makeup, the rupture of the acting synergy inherent in the switch diminishes the heart-rending effect made possible in the book, where Michael and Hanna are imagined to age together.

As it turns out, in both the book and the movie, Hanna was illiterate for most of her life, and hid her disability from the young Michael Berg, her streetcar company employers, and even the judge at her war-crimes trial. In the latter circumstance, it is as if she were more ashamed of being illiterate than of the atrocities committed with her tacit consent. She only learned to read and write late in her prison term, when Michael sent her tapes of the books he had read aloud to her during the year of their affair.

Mr. Daldry is quoted in the production notes on the subject of the banality of the Nazi Holocaust as a movie subject: “There have been 252 films made about the holocaust, and I hope there are at least as many more.” Still, he regards his own film as something of an exception, or, “an odd piece,” as he defines it, in that a lone survivor who has written a book on the horror is treated as a moral pillar instead of a pathetically weakened victim. Still, despite the efforts of Mr. Hare, Mr. Daldry, and producers Donna Gigliotti, Redmond Morris and the late Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, the Holocaust remains the elephant in the room that deadens the elements of surprise and suspense we have been conditioned to expect in screen narratives.

This is not to say that the performances of Ms. Winslet, Mr. Kross and Mr. Fiennes are anything less than convincingly heartfelt. This is especially true of Ms. Winslet, who is appearing later this month in Revolutionary Road, directed by husband Sam Mendes and adapted from the much-admired novel by Richard Yates. Ms. Winslet is to be reunited with Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time since they made box-office history together in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), after she made her sparkling debut at 19 in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). She has never been adequately appreciated for all of her strikingly offbeat performances, but now her time may have come at last. Finally, more than a footnote should be devoted to the curiously ambivalent performance of the legendary German actor Bruno Ganz, as young Michael Berg’s relentlessly skeptical questioner in law school.

A rave from Rex Reed in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER (he calls it a masterpiece)...

The turkey’s in the soup, the retailers are praying for a Merry Christmas, and the year-end movie countdown is in full swing. I’ve still got a few items on my screening list, but I will go out on a limb right now and predict I will see nothing greater, more haunting, wrenching or profound, than The Reader. I’m preparing you in advance. One viewing is not enough. It opens next week and I can’t wait to see it again.

Adapted by David Hare from the renowned best-selling literary sensation by German novelist Bernhard Schlink; meticulously directed by the formidable Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot); and starring Kate Winslet in an Oscar-caliber performance that is one of the most devastating of her career, with a supporting cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz and young newcomer David Kross—one of the most sensitive and charismatic discoveries in years—The Reader arrives with artistry stamped all over it. But no expectation can prepare you for its emotional impact. It has left me dazed.

The Holocaust figures into the plot, but instead of being a movie about the horrors of World War II, The Reader bridges the controversial gap between two generations—the Germans who lived and committed crimes under Hitler, and the generation of young postwar Germans who still don’t understand their country’s past. The emotional probing, spiritual shame and moral confusion that connect the people from these diverse generations is the glue that makes The Reader such a vital, important and timeless motion picture. I am so passionate about it that I think it should be taught in film schools. It is certainly a work of overwhelming accomplishment.

Berlin, 1995. The wall is long gone. It’s a new world, but successful lawyer Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) cannot forget the events that shaped his manhood. When he was 15, he fell ill in a doorway with scarlet fever and was rescued by a lady streetcar conductor who bathed him and took him home to his family. After two months of recovery, he returned with flowers, and a sexual relationship began that changed his life forever. Empowered by first love, the naïve, virginal schoolboy learns many things from the older woman. His grades improve; he develops self-confidence; and he spends an erotic summer passing the time between country picnics and rainy-afternoon orgasms reading aloud the great literary works of Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Chekhov and Homer to a woman old enough to be his mother, who calls herself simply Hanna. One day he arrives to find her apartment empty. Hanna has disappeared without a trace, and the boy is left alone, tormented and confused by a haze of memories.

By 1966, Michael is a bright, promising law student in Heidelberg whose class attends a trial of Nazi war criminals accused of murdering 600 Jews. In the courtroom docks, one of the defendants turns out to be his beloved Hanna, who is accused of being an SS guard at Auschwitz. Stricken mute and overcome with conflicting emotions that leave him shattered, Michael is further astonished when she confesses to personally writing the orders that condemned 300 of the inmates to death. But wait. Michael knows his old friend could neither read nor write. That’s why he was the reader and she was the grateful listener. Knowing she has given a false confession to save her pride, Michael is the only person with the one piece of evidence that can save her. Torn between the embers of a lost love for her and the truth of who and what she really was in a war that was before his time, the young man makes his own pilgrimage to Auschwitz, where the ovens are now tourist attractions. Will he save her, or will he remain quietly and morally indignant along with the rest of his generation? This story is far from over, and what happens in the next 20 years and leading up to present-day Germany will leave you with your mouth wide open. To say more would spoil what I promise unequivocally will be one of the most uplifting movie experiences of your life.

Magnificently photographed by both Chris Menges and Roger Deakins, two of the most distinguished cinematographers of our time, The Reader is a miracle of delicacy, psychological insight and surprising hopefulness as one generation seeks retribution for the sins of their fathers. The acting is superb. Lena Olin has a scene near the end that deserves a supporting-actress Oscar; Ms. Winslet surpasses all promise; and as the boy who grows into a man paying a supreme price for the loss of innocence, David Kross has such range and sensitivity that he wraps himself around your heart and builds a permanent home there. I can think of no praise high enough for Stephen Daldry, whose compassionate direction obstinately resists the lure to indulge any sentimental slush. The Reader is a masterpiece.

A mixed review from David Ansen in NEWSWEEK...

Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader" was a terse, morally complex, erotically charged novel that examined the impact of German guilt on the generation born after the Holocaust. Director Stephen Daldry ("The Hours") and playwright David Hare have taken up the challenge of turning this double-edged, cerebral book into a film, and it's not surprising—movies being better at the visible than the internal—that the eroticism trumps the moral complexity.

Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) is a well-educated schoolboy who, in 1958, falls into a passionate relationship with a secretive, tough, working-class wo-man 20 years older. Hanna (Kate Winslet) is a woman of few words, sudden rages and a hungry sexual appetite that's matched by her equal ardor for literature; she demands, as foreplay, that Michael read Homer, Twain and Chekhov to her.

Then one day, after seeing each other in secret all summer, Hanna vanishes. The next time Michael spots her, eight years later, he's a law student witnessing a war-crimes trial—and Hanna is in the dock. She's willing to confess her role as a guard at Auschwitz, but she has one secret—a far less damning one—that she clings to with even deeper shame.

"The Reader" is not about the horrors of the "final solution." It's about how Michael deals with the fact that the great first love of his life was implicated in these atrocities. Ralph Fiennes plays Michael in middle age— a parched, solitary man of the law whose unusual relationship with the older Hanna raises questions about his own moral compass. "The Reader" can feel stilted and abstract: the film's only flesh-and-blood characters spend half the movie separated. But its emotional impact sneaks up on you. "The Reader" asks tough questions, and, to its credit, provides no easy answers.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,

A positive review from THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...

Film Review: The Reader
By Kirk Honeycutt, November 30, 2008 11:00 ET

Bottom Line: A love affair between a younger man and an older woman sharply reflects the conflicts between Germany's war and postwar generations


During the making of "The Reader," producers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella passed away. This last film is a testament to the kind of productions each was associated with in his career -- 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 but also 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, focused 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 film opens Dec. 10, expands Christmas Day and goes national Jan. 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 is startled to find 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?

The film makes no attempt to answer this question if indeed there is an answer. There is an explanation, not immediately apparent, for why Hanna found herself in a position to dictate life or death. But there is neither an excuse nor an offer of atonement ready for her.

Neither Hare nor Daldry shows us any easy way to look at this character. They muddy the waters and complicate the emotions, but the facts of her actions smother any possible empathy.

What remains unclear, in the film at least, is why Michael has seemingly never thought about any of this before 1966. Did he never question his father -- depicted here as a stern, unsympathetic man -- about what he did during the war?

To Winslet and Kross belong the gutsy, intense performances of the film. Lena Olin as a unyielding camp survivor and Bruno Ganz as a sagacious law professor put in memorable appearances. Fiennes is solid as the elder Berg, but by this stage of life the "oldness" Hanna once exhibited has caught up with him too, making his a somewhat listless role.

Superior production work in Germany by top professionals led by two of the world's finest cinematographers in Chris Menges and Roger Deakins gives what is a very tough story a fine professional polish.

I get the double standard arguments. In fact, if that minor controversy becomes major, then forget about it winning Best Picture and KW's chances of winning will be greatly diminished. But having said that, if it were about a young girl being seduced by an older man, it wouldn't even get a release. Like the remake of Lolita. It's not fair but it's the last double standard there is. Most people just don't care if a 15 year old boy is deflowered by an older woman, mainly because men, boys, are expected to have sex. It's not the end of the world for us. Girls, women on the other hand, are treated the exact oppposite way. They are not expected (by society) to have sex. Or be sexual until they are older. It's stupid but it's how people think.

wow, that was more than a rave. by far my most awaited film of the year

A negative review from Anthony Lane in THE NEW YORKER (part of a combined review with "Doubt")...

For those who think of cinema as dramatic roughage, “The Reader” should prove sufficiently indigestible. Directed by Stephen Daldry, and adapted by David Hare from the novel by Bernhard Schlink, it stars Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor in the German town of Neustadt. In 1958, she embarks on an affair with a fifteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael (David Kross). “Look at me, kid,” she says, casually adopting the Humphrey Bogart position. They fall into the swing of a routine: first he reads to her, then they make love. In many ways, the ideal existence.

Time slouches on, and, in 1966, Michael, now a law student, sees Hanna again, this time in a courtroom, where she is being tried for her actions as an S.S. guard. He should be shocked by this revelation, but Kross—who, I regret to say, is borderline bovine throughout—merely lowers his muzzle and pants a bit, and Daldry himself seems to miss the moment, as if he had spent too long chewing it over. The whole film, in fact, with its loping pace and plaintive score, feels like a woefully polite, not to say British, take on a foreign horror; was there really no one, from the fierce new wave of German filmmakers, prepared to dramatize the Schlink? Or did they feel, as I did, that it was pernicious from the start—a low-grade musing on atrocity, garnished with erotic titillation? Imprisoned for life, Hanna must read to herself, but are we really supposed to be moved by the thought—or now, in Daldry’s film, by the sight—of an unrepentant Nazi parsing Chekhov? That is not culturally nourishing; it is morally famished. There is a fine scene, near the end, when a survivor of Hanna’s crimes (the great Lena Olin) tells the middle-aged Michael (Ralph Fiennes) that “nothing came out of the camps,” that they “weren’t therapy.” Quite true, so why has the film pretended otherwise?

A ** review from SLANT...

by Nick Schager
Posted: December 7, 2008

Once again drawn to a tale that alternates between (and often parallels) intrinsically connected pasts and presents, The Hours director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare exhibit, with The Reader, a continued inability to thrillingly translate literary forms to the screen. Even greater than it was in their previous Virginia Wolf-centric collaboration, the problem is that the two mediums aren't necessarily natural bedmates, as piercingly evidenced by the filmmakers' method of adaptation, in which faithful straightforwardness gets the particulars correct but makes their source material's plot tropes, symbols and mirroring structure both simplistic and obvious. Transposing German author Bernhard Schlink's novel about a young boy's maiden sexual relationship with an older woman and, years later, the devastating revelations that come to light about his lover's true identity, Daldry and Hare's film has the stately polish and thoughtfulness that's come to define award-courting season, a sort of faux-highbrow atmosphere whose measured deliberateness, when matched by intense star turns, implies prestige. Yet even a minor peek underneath this elegant surface reveals clunky conventions and superficial shorthand dramatizations, both of which are delivered with self-important sophistication intended to mask the fact that the affair is no more graceful or profound than your average Hollywood mediocrity.

Which is a shame, as The Reader occasionally bumps up against the pressing, universal tension that derives from furiously wanting to alter the past, and yet recognizing that not only is said desire impossible, but that one's anguish over this powerlessness can never be fully assuaged. This discord blooms in the heart of 15-year-old Michael (David Kross), who, stricken with scarlet fever in 1958, is aided on his way home one day by thirtysomething stranger Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). When he returns months later to thank Hanna for her kindness, she catches him peeking at her putting on stockings and responds by bathing him, pleasuring him, and then having him read to her. Their affair, depicted through the prism of adult, divorced Michael's (Ralph Fiennes) remembrances, is given flickering vitality by a few early offhand images (such as Michael's feet racing to another rendezvous). However, a dinner sequence in which flatware clink-clanging ignites Michael's memories of devouring Hanna is a thing of eye-rolling silliness, and moreover, their initial courtship—he tentative and excited by his first lessons in carnality, she concealing concern over their May-December amour with sternness—feels basic, familiar. And as Michael begins regularly visiting Hanna, Daldry's grip on the material quickly goes slack, beginning with the director's insertion of a needless, upfront articulation-of-theme from a teacher who opines that secrets define character.

This blunt thesis statement is followed by Michael telling Hanna that "I didn't think I was good at anything" and, intriguingly, a cutaway to the sight of him confidently, joyously dominating a game of gym-class handball. It's a tantalizing suggestion of dueling deceptions to come, but alas, The Reader never makes good on that promise, as once Hanna suddenly disappears, and her young beau grows into a joyless, emotionally detached law student studying, in 1966, under the tutelage of Bruno Ganz's professor, Michael is reduced to a man conflicted but not particularly complicated. Attending the war crimes trial of female SS guards who stood by as 300 Jews burned to death in a church during the Death March from Auschwitz, Michael is stunned to find that Hanna is one of the accused. It's a discovery that, regrettably, obliterates any potential focus on his own hinted-at (self-)deception and, instead, pivots the action around his agony over both adoring, and now despising, his former erotic muse—who, to make matters worse, used to make doomed inmates read to her, thus saddling Michael with the added realization that he unwittingly served as Hanna's concentration camp prisoner-by-proxy.

Michael's love/hate turmoil propels The Reader into a flip-flopping second half concerned with his attendance at the trial—in which he realizes that Hanna is secretly illiterate, hence her requests to be read to—and his adult efforts to grapple with the past, which mainly involve making audio recordings of books for the incarcerated Hanna. All the while, narrative echoes begin piling up, each of them so tidily schematic that the story's literary roots become distractingly glaring, a situation compounded by two protagonists who are embodied with earnest gravity by Winslet and Kross/Fiennes, yet, like the many plot device-only peripheral figures, remain fuzzy, shallow creations. Even more than the book-on-film atmosphere and the pitiful, disengaging old-age makeup Winslet eventually dons, it's the filmmakers' inability to immerse themselves in, and wrestle with, their characters' distress that ultimately proves most troublesome. Though nominally about individuals' inner—and, by extension, post-Holocaust Germany's national—struggles with history, The Reader remains a stiff, external affair, too refined to muck about in its protagonists' consuming confusion, and too leaden and contrived to allow anything to organically materialize, epitomized by a final conversation between Michael and the sole church-fire survivor (Lena Olin) that takes great pains to spell out those very thematic points which, in the name of subtle storytelling, should best be left unspoken.

Without seeing any of them (maybe I'll try doing it this way for the 2008 Oscar cycle) I'm beginning to think that among Doubt/Revolutionary Road/The Reader (the "heavy" literary entries this year) only one at most is going to be a best picture nominee. Not sure which one yet; maybe none.

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Without seeing any of them (maybe I'll try doing it this way for the 2008 Oscar cycle) I'm beginning to think that among Doubt/Revolutionary Road/The Reader (the "heavy" literary entries this year) only one at most is going to be a best picture nominee. Not sure which one yet; maybe none.

This is a very intelligent observation!

I hope it is Rev Road, I've seen all three and that is the one that I personally think is the best...the other two are kind of stuffy and adult.

quote:

Originally posted by Mary Queen of Scots:

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Without seeing any of them (maybe I'll try doing it this way for the 2008 Oscar cycle) I'm beginning to think that among Doubt/Revolutionary Road/The Reader (the "heavy" literary entries this year) only one at most is going to be a best picture nominee. Not sure which one yet; maybe none.

This is a very intelligent observation!

I hope it is Rev Road, I've seen all three and that is the one that I personally think is the best...the other two are kind of stuffy and adult.

Goodness no—let's have NO films made for "adults"!!!

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Without seeing any of them (maybe I'll try doing it this way for the 2008 Oscar cycle) I'm beginning to think that among Doubt/Revolutionary Road/The Reader (the "heavy" literary entries this year) only one at most is going to be a best picture nominee. Not sure which one yet; maybe none.

It sounds weird, but it might actually be better not to see the movies as to limit the bias that might form when predicting. Of course, it depends on whether someone would rather be more right or have a favorite movie, actor, song, etc., and would rather see that person or thing nominated and hopefully win than being right on his/her predictions. Or the third category where there's a combination of both things where someone wants ____ to win, but he/she is realistic enough to keep his/her biases in check. (I would probably fall into the third category, but sometimes the second category especially if factions start forming.)

As for those three movies, I'm predicting none right now because Frost/Nixon seems like it has a lot of appeal right now. Of course, one of those three movies could still get in, but I think right now Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Milk are solid right now, and I would almost use the word lock if I didn't hate that word being thrown around all the time. Then, I think The Dark Knight and Frost/Nixon have the best chances, but they're not as solid as the first three which may make room for the other three probably Revolutionary Road because it has the best all around reviews.

A B- movie review from Lisa Schwarzbaum in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

The Reader is a pretty good screen adaptation of a very good, semiautobiographical novel about guilt and reconciliation among a German generation that came of age after the rise and fall of Nazism. The film is notable for its nice performances, its handsome photography, and its very active music. If the preceding praise sounds generic, so is the movie: Everything is admirable, worthy, and muffled in a blanket of Britishness in this well-bred production, which reunites director Stephen Daldry with screenwriter David Hare six years after The Hours. But nothing pierces, shocks, or challenges with an originality that meets the source material even halfway.

Certainly the story, by Bernhard Schlink, is a grabber (millions in Oprah's Book Club have already grabbed it). Michael (fresh-faced newcomer David Kross), a teenage boy in postwar Germany, tumbles into a secretive affair with Hanna (Kate Winslet), a passionate older woman. The liaison is hot with sex, during which Winslet once again demonstrates her endearing talent for being honest while naked; as foreplay, Michael reads great books to his literature-hungry lover. Then Hanna vanishes — and when Michael sees her next, he's a law student observing a courtroom where she's on trial for crimes committed in Hitler's name.

Ralph Fiennes has perhaps the toughest job, playing the morose adult Michael — a version, we can assume, of the author. Fiennes masters the default demeanor of someone perpetually pained. The Reader, similarly, represents a received notion of a significant movie with a Holocaust theme. B–

quote:

Originally posted by pacinofan:
The liaison is hot with sex, during which Winslet once again demonstrates her endearing talent for being honest while naked;

Honest, hell! I'll settle for naked.

Not particularly good NYTimes review:

Innocence Is Lost in Postwar Germany



By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 10, 2008

“The Reader” is a scrupulously tasteful — more on that word tasteful later — film about an erotic affair that turns to love. It is also, more obliquely, about the Holocaust and the generation of Germans who came of age after that catastrophe. This, at any rate, is what the film would have us believe it’s about, though mostly it involves Kate Winslet, her taut belly and limbs gleaming under the caressing light, deflowering a very surprised-looking teenage boy who grows up to become a depressed-looking Ralph Fiennes.



Directed by Stephen Daldry and fussily adapted by David Hare from a slender novel by the German author Bernhard Schlink, the story opens in 1995 Germany with Mr. Fiennes as a lawyer, Michael Berg, bidding an uncomfortable goodbye to an apparent one-night stand. (He makes the woman breakfast, but stands at an awkward remove when she leaves.) From the cool, sleek surfaces of his carefully appointed apartment and the downward curve of his mouth, it appears that Michael either lives an ordered if unhappy life or that Mr. Daldry has no fear when it comes to embracing stereotypes about chilly Germans. Both turn out to be true, as the nominal reasons for Michael’s pained smile are excavated through fluid flashbacks and somber revelations.



The first flashback occurs shortly after the doleful opener, with Michael staring out a window at a passing train, an image that transports him to 1958, where his 15-year-old self (David Kross) sits hunched inside a streetcar in obvious pain. The young Michael rushes into the rainy streets and retches inside a building vestibule. A woman (Ms. Winslet) materializes, as if from nowhere, briskly cleans the mess and tells him to follow her. He does and, not long after, inside a flat lined with hanging nylons and clutter, she orders the boy out of his clothes and into the tub, before opening a towel and her legs to him. A discreet affair ensues, characterized by shots of decorously writhing flesh, tears, smiles, shouts and literature: Michael reads aloud to Hanna.



In time the lovers separate, and the story skips to the 1960s, with Michael wearing sideburns and attending law school. One day a professor (Bruno Ganz) takes him and a few other students to a court where some women are being tried for Nazi war crimes, which is how Hanna re-enters Michael’s life. During the proceedings he comes to realize her secret, her shame, which has nothing to do with her being a Nazi prison guard: she’s illiterate. She goes to prison, years pass, and Mr. Fiennes takes over for Mr. Kross. Eventually a Holocaust survivor (Lena Olin) living in a swank Manhattan apartment delivers a stern lecture to Michael about exploiting the Holocaust, an admonition that arrives too late for this fatuous film.



Paradoxically, Mr. Hare’s apparent attempt to deepen or underline the novel’s ideas about the past informing the present, by kinking up its linear chronology with flashbacks, proves crippling: scrambling the time frame, so that the story repeatedly points to the past, only exposes the deep vein of self-pity that runs through the novel, flattening Mr. Schlink’s already unpersuasive bid at generational soul-seeking. The problems are evident in the film’s first flashback to Michael on that streetcar. The location would be meaningless (the scene isn’t in the novel), but this is Germany 13 years after the end of World War II, and an unhappy boy in a rail car isn’t just an unhappy boy: he is an allusion to the millions transported to the death camps.



Mr. Schlink writes that “the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate.” In the novel and the film — which monumentalizes every trembling lip and fluttering eyelash, turning human gestures into Kodak moments — Michael’s pain turns him not just into Hanna’s victim, but also a kind of survivor. Outrageously, Hanna is a victim too, because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism. Not that the film dwells on barbarism: beauty is its currency, from the cinematography (by Chris Menges and Roger Deakins) that makes Ms. Winslet’s pale skin creamy, to the immaculate production design (Brigitte Broch). Even Michael’s visit to an extermination camp is beautifully lighted.



There’s no surprise, of course, in a Hollywood movie designed for adult audiences (and for the awards season) featuring attractive lighting, seductive stars and glossy production values. And certainly there are things to recommend here, notably the affecting Mr. Kross and the rumpled, professionally weary Mr. Ganz. Ms. Winslet looks lovely, even when wearing a smear of wrinkles and a little gray during the later scenes, but she’s playing an impossible character. Her stern mien, clipped enunciation (most of the cast speaks in German-accented English) and abrupt, metronymic gestures are an uneasy fit for this naturally appealing and open actress and occasionally tilt into near-comedy, as in the scene in which Hanna furiously scrubs Michael in her bathtub with a brush and momentarily turns into a very naughty nurse.



Although the commercial imperatives that drive a movie like this one are understandable — the novel was a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, for starters — you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation

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A *** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...

Delicate business is being transacted here concerning the nature of guilt, legal and moral. OK, that should scare off the action-junkie crowd. Now we can talk. Director Stephen Daldry and playwright David Hare, collaborators on The Hours, have done something profoundly right in bringing Bernhard Schlink's controversial German novel to the screen: They've made it personal. What if the person you love turns out to be a monster? That question arises when 15-year-old virgin Michael Berg (David Kross) starts a summer affair in postwar Berlin with tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). After sex, Michael reads to her from the works of literary giants, and then this older woman who calls him Kid disappears.

Eight years later, Michael, now a law student, finds Hanna again, revealed as a former Nazi guard, on trial for war crimes. Ralph Fiennes hauntingly plays the older Michael, a divorced father given to isolation. Michael records books on tape to send to Hanna in jail and wrestles with his conscience like many second-generation Germans trying to cope with complicit guilt. Fiennes shares a scene with the mesmerizing Lena Olin that cuts to the core of survivor guilt. These are weighty issues that the film sometimes trips over. Winslet doesn't. Her fierce, unerring portrayal goes beyond acting, becoming a provocation that will keep you up nights.