The Reader

Here's my first review of a film seen on a plane. Not much different from other reviews, apart from the fact that they decided to reset the entertainment system 5 minutes from the end so I had to fast forward through the whole thing to finish it.

Anyway, The Reader is the film for which Kate Winslet won an Oscar for best actress. I am a bit fan of Winslet, she's a down-to-earth lass who comes from my local area and has put in a fair few awesome performances. Now she finally has the Hollywood accolade she deserves. As a result I was expecting something pretty spectacular from her in The Reader.

Winslet's character is a lonely woman living in German in the 1950s who has a romantic summer encounter with local teenager Michael Berg. She seems to be a woman of contradictions, eager to keep her own company yet at the same time yearning to spend time with this youth. The boy reads to her and then they have sex - this is their relationship. As the story moves on a few years, the dark secret of Winslet's character is revealed - her involvement with the Nazi regime.

The film is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly there is the reaction of the post-war German population to the knowledge that everyone over the age of about 20 was probably complicit in the Nazis' crimes on some level or another. Secondly there is the nature of the relationship between the two characters. The obviously paedophilic nature of their relationship is never emphasised, maybe this is a comment on the reaction of the German population to the post war situation - in the clamour to blame someone for the Nazis' crimes, other transgressions are perhaps forgotten about.

Thirdly, and for me most importantly, there is Winslet's character herself. She is a study of how ordinary people react during desperate times. This is a woman who was a loner, going nowhere in life. Suddenly she was given a job by the Nazis, suddenly she was important. What would I have done in that situation? How desperate and lonely does someone have to get before they abandon their principles and start looking the other way? If Germany condemns one woman, why not condemn the entire population? As Michael Berg says to his lecturer - "Everybody knew!"

The entire film is about this character's desire for absolution. She wants to be punished for what she did and at the same time her nation is happy to use her as a scapegoat in order to absolve themselves of the same guilt.

Winslet carries this all on her shoulders. With a fantastically understated performance she manages to bear the burden of post-war Germany's Nazi guilt and desire for forgiveness. Needless-to-say, I thought she and the film were brilliant.