My memories of “The Reader” have haunted me ever since I recently watched it. There’s a very good reason Kate Winslet took home an Academy Award in 2009 for her role as Hanna Schmitz, a woman who harbors a secret Nazi past while having a summer fling with a fifteen-year-old boy. Winslet is exciting in this role. While on the surface one might condemn Schmitz’s actions, there are too many layers to this emotional human drama for her to be simply black and white.
David Kross plays the young man with almost the same agility as Winslet; His character, Michael Berg, never gets a chance to remove those layers. Flashbacks with the incomparable Ralph Fiennes as the adult Michael show that he has struggled throughout his life with how his summer date defined him, with no clear resolution as Hanna simply disappeared at the end of the summer. .
Water plays an important role in this movie. It is raining on the first day the boy meets the woman, while he cowers, vomiting from an oncoming bout of scarlet fever, in the bedroom of his building. She comes to her aid, washing her vomit off the floor with a bucket of water. Several weeks later, when his illness has subsided, she brings him a bouquet of flowers to thank him for her help. She tells him to find coal for her in the cellar; when he returns, covered in coal dust, she runs him a bath. The matter of him has now been set inextricably in motion.
He is a bright young man who gains confidence in his flirtation with women. One doesn’t think of him as “underage” except during a two-day bike tour he has convinced her to come along with, when the two order lunch. In daylight, it appears to the waitress that they are mother and son. When she comments as he pays that “I hope your mom enjoyed her meal”, he says “Yeah, a lot” (out of Hanna’s earshot). He then walks over to Hanna and kisses her on the lips.
Maybe Hanna would have fired Michael after their first sexual encounter, but once he starts reading to her, she becomes addicted. He has no idea that she can’t read, or much more about her. It is when he begins to study law, years after the summer affair, when he attends a trial, that he discovers the truth about Hanna.
Whereas the typical actor would take 20 minutes of soliloquy, Winslet and Fiennes can portray thoughts and feelings in a gesture or facial expression. Also, the makeup artists on this film are to be commended for aging them so flawlessly, as the story begins in 1958 and ends in 1995. The Summer of ’42 seems creepy by comparison.
Fiennes, Winslet and Kross work wonderfully together.
