Reader

Starring: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz
Director: Stephen Daldry
Rating 3/5
Date Seen: 24/02/2009
After Seeing Kate Winslet win the oscar for best acteress for the movie 'Reader' I wanted to see the movie . And I personally liked it. It is a movie that wants you to take it seriously as a profound discussion about complicity and moral obligation. The source of the movie is a novel by Bernhard Schlick, it was a critical and commercial success. In short, this movie so drips with earnest good intentions that the nobility of the exercise .

The movie plays, like the novel, in three parts. The first takes place in West Germany in the 1950s. A sixteen-year old school boy (an impressive David Kross) has an affair with a woman twenty years his senior.They enjoy each other physically but both are evasive. He tells her what she wants to hear - that he's not a star pupil. She tells him precisely nothing. She asks him to read aloud to her. He clearly enjoys the performance. And then, one day, she vanishes and he is devastated.

The second act takes place in the 1960s. The boy is a law student, and is taught to carefully separate moral responsibility from a narrow definition of legal guilt. He is disgusted to discover that his old lover is on trial for murdering Jews during the Holocaust and that he has evidence that will mitigate her sentence. He has to reconcile the woman he knew with the unfeeling, narrowly obedient and unrepentant woman he sees in court.

The third act takes place in the 1980s. The teenage boy has developed into a fastidious old man with a failed marriage and an estranged daughter. For a complex set of reasons he begins to record audio books and send them to his old lover. Maybe he does this out of misplaced vanity, maybe guilt, maybe nostalgia, maybe boredom, maybe a desire to connect with anyone - Ralph Fiennes' opaque performance gives us no help in making his motives out.
The characters rarely face off. They rarely confront or challenge each other. And because the film never risks disrupting the all-pervasive mood of stately good taste it struggles to shift into second gear. This movie is a good watch though.