My memories of “The Reader” have haunted me ever since I recently watched it. There’s a very good reason Kate Winslet won an Academy Award in 2009 for her role as Hanna Schmitz, a woman harboring a secret Nazi past while having a summer affair with a fifteen-year-old boy. Winslet is enthralled 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 simply be 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 peel those layers off. 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 film. It is raining the first day the boy meets the woman, as 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 basement; when he returns, covered in coal dust, she draws him a bath. His business has now been inextricably set in motion.
He is a bright young man who gains confidence in his flirtation with the woman. One doesn’t think of him as “underage” except during a two-day bike ride that he has convinced her to come along with, when the two order lunch. In daylight, it seems to the waitress that they are mother and son. When she comments as he pays that “I hope your mother enjoyed her food,” he says “Yes, very much” (out of earshot of Hanna). He then walks over to Hanna and kisses her on the lips.
Hanna may have fired Michael after their first sexual encounter, but once he starts reading to her, she becomes addicted. He has no idea that she doesn’t know how to read, or much else about her. It’s when he starts law school, years after the summer fling, when he attends a trial, that he finds out the truth about Hanna.
While it would take the typical actor 20 minutes of soliloquy, Winslet and Fiennes can portray thoughts and feelings in a gesture or facial expression. Also, the make-up artists in this film are to be commended for aging them so flawlessly, as the story begins in 1958 and ends in 1995. A haunting insight into the psyche of two people in post-war Germany, making “The Summer The 42” looks creepy by comparison.
Fiennes, Winslet and Kross work wonderfully together.
