S P L I N T E R E D | L I G H T

In post World War II Germany an affair takes place between a 15-year-old boy named Michael (David Kross) and a woman about 20 years older named Hanna (Kate Winslet). For a summer they maintain an intense and purely sexual relationship that Hanna starts as abruptly as she ends – one day he shows up and her apartment is vacant. Several years on it is the mid 1960s and Michael is in law school. He takes a special seminar where a small group of students attend and discuss Nazi war-crime trials. The defendant – Hanna.

That is what The Reader is about in the strictest sense, but you may also hear that it is about generational divides – as in Germany where the generation that lived through the war gave way to the generation who had not and was largely ignorant. Yet, I do not think the movie is really about that either. In an early scene a literature professor tells his class that ‘the secret’ is the key to western literature. A character has to have something to withhold. Secrecy and withholding are habits for the characters in The Reader. The film carefully shows the crippling effects of such a lifestyle. There is so much to mull over, The Reader is the most haunting film I have seen this fall.

Hanna has secrets that she never reveals to Michael during their brief relationship. The entire affair seems to spring from a place of hurt and isolation. Hanna’s intense guilt is just barely kept in check by her pride. With a clenched jaw and quivering lip, Kate Winslet, who is in my opinion the best actress of her generation, mixes austerity and vulnerability in Hanna. When she makes Michael read classics of western literature aloud to her we begin to see the void in her life. She is desperate for beauty and healing, yet has no way into it on her own. In one scene they come to a country church while a children’s choir is practicing. Hannah overcome by the simple beauty of the voices takes a seat in the vacant pews and cries. Michael looks on from the doorway. He is completely ignorant of the great wounds in her life, and completely unable to reach her.

Yet in her attempt at catharsis Hanna only spreads her pain. Defenseless and completely unawares Michael has contracted it like an STD. He is 15 and involved at the deepest emotional level with a woman twice his age. When he recognizes Hanna at the trial his past and her past become immediately intertwined – her secrets become his secrets. Because they are not acknowledged or confronted, his life and hers become sealed off. Years latter his marriage has fallen apart, and he is living in emotional isolation – isolation from his wife, his mother, and his daughter.

Director Stephen Daldry meticulously brings out the texture of this pain. An effect that can only be achieved by strong direction and a conscious effort of actors, cinematographers, costume designers, set designers, and composers, all of whom have done their job expertly. The film never draws attention to itself or pushes too hard, yet the story is told with great detail and visual precision. After Hanna and Michael have been together for the first time he returns to dinner with his family. Mouths fill the frame and deafening chewing drowns out all other sounds. The mundane amplifies the secret, and the secret distances from the mundane. A muted palette of blues and grays, browns and whites, shot through doorframes, windowpanes, banisters, and tresses imposes a further distance. This film is overcast. 

Both Hanna and Michael become, in their turn, the reader of the title. There is some redemption in this small triumph but only one character is able to move ahead emotionally. Although it can offer great solace for a time, redemption cannot ultimately be found in great literature. In The Reader redemption can only come if one stops withholding.