The central character is Michael Berg, a man haunted by the memory of his first love, a 30-something woman named Hanna Schmitz, whom he met in the summer of 1958. He was 14 at the time. When Hanna left without a trace during that same year, he was devastated. He went on with his life carrying an emotional scar that impaired his every relationship.
What makes the memory extra-haunting, however, is that his once summer fling also turns out to be a Nazi war criminal responsible for the death of countless Jews.
Supposedly, the main conflict of the film arises when Michael tries to reconcile the sweet, caring lover with the cold, heartless enforcer of genocide. And in presenting this conflict, director Stephen Daldry, screenwriter David Hare (and novelist Bernhard Schlink, for that matter), does something unprecedented: they try to humanize a Nazi.
You could view this attempt as either "brave" or "insane". While in the middle of watching the movie, I saw it as "fascinating".
A Nazi is the easiest portrayal in cinema and literature. He/she is stern, full of hatred, and cold-blooded. They don't have normal lives, they don't have normal human emotions. You could say that it's a caricature, but it's probably well-deserved. Adolf Hitler committed crimes so unspeakable that no sane person can even begin to understand them. So we assign a term to describe him and others like him: "evil".
The nature of evil is that it cannot be understood, nor should it be understood. It just exists.
"The Reader" makes a counter-intuitive proposal: a Nazi is just like you and me. Hanna the Nazi is not a scheming maniacal white-supremacist; she is a woman given to random acts of kindness, and apparently armed with an unbridled sexual appetite. Neither is she a woman of high power; she is poor, alone, lonely, and completely insecure over her illiteracy. Because of this, Hanna enjoys having Michael read her the classics as much as making love to him.
Several critics have lambasted "The Reader" for its supposed intention of "making us feel sorry for a Nazi"; for suggesting that Hanna's membership in the SS is understandable since she was uneducated. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times says the movie is really about "making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation." Here in the Philippines, my all-time writing heroine, Jessica Zafra recently wrote a concisely scathing piece about the movie in her blog.
There is a taboo out there against humanizing Hitler and the Nazis. Right now, I'm reading Stephen Fry's novel, "Making History" (which is taking me forever to finish; I would've been a terrible reader for Hanna, we'd just go straight to sex) where his lead character is trying to write a doctoral thesis on Hitler's upbringing, in his effort to "understand evil". In his paper, we get a glimpse of the poverty into which the future Fuhrer was born and the suffering of his battered mother. His professor admonishes him for writing something so sick.
That got me wondering: is "The Reader" a 'sick' film?
Based on what I've gathered from a couple of Stephen Daldry interviews I've seen on TV, he wants "The Reader" to tackle two things: (1) Germany's postwar guilt, especially that of the generation that was born right after World War II; and (2) the moral and emotional complexity of having fallen in love with someone who turns out to be a facilitator of mass murder.
The question dangling in my head as I went to watch "The Reader" was this: "Was Daldry successful in his artistic objectives or did he just end up making a movie begging people to feel sorry for a Nazi?"
The answer, as it turns out, is a bit tricky. In the film, German postwar guilt is used as a parallel to Michael's disillusionment over his teenage love affair with Hanna. As he would later find out, he lost his virginity to someone guilty of war crimes, in the same manner that he and other Germans of his generation found themselves born in a country guilty of war crimes.
While watching Daldry's treatment unravel before my eyes, I was instantly reminded of another movie that used postwar guilt as a parallel to a tragic love story (which is also one of my all-time favorite movies): "The Remains of the Day".
The movie is about servants working at an English manor just before World War II. The story centers on the head butler, Mr. Stevens (played exquisitely by Anthony Hopkins) and his unspoken love for the head housekeeper, Ms. Kenton (Emma Thompson). Mr. Stevens is an old school English gentleman who does not let emotion get in the way of his committment to duty. This makes him a fantastic butler, but an atrocious love interest, much to the frustration of Ms. Kenton.
The sexual tension builds against the backdrop of German appeasement before the war. In this fictional universe, one of the leading figures in Britain's most embarassing 20th century moment is one Lord Darlington, Mr. Stevens' and Ms. Kenton's master.
Like "The Reader", "The Remains of the Day" is told in flashbacks, where Mr. Stevens' regrets on love are mirrored to Lord Darlington's regret for naively giving in to the Nazi's demands. This parallelism worked, as evidenced by how beautifully painful "The Remains of the Day" turned out to be.
The treatment for "The Reader", however, was problematic. The fundamental difference between the two movies (apart from the fact that Lord Darlington's "crime" pales in comparison to Hanna's CRIMES) is that the main protagonists in "Remains" were merely observers of the "crime" that was being committed (In fact, one of the genuises of the film is its conceit that global politics take a back seat to the ostensibly behind-the-scenes world of house servants). In "The Reader", Hanna serves as both the subtext and the main text. In other words, she embodies the movie's apparent story and its metaphor, simultaenously.
That's not the problem in itself. The real problem is that the apparent story (the one about the disenchanted young boy and the illiterate woman) flies off in its weightlessness when placed on the same scale with its subtext (the ghosts of Germany's holocaust sins).
Case in point: it was infinitely difficult to latch on to Michael's dismay upon watching Hanna lie during her trial just so she could hide her illiteracy. We're supposed to be equally shocked at that as we were with the revelation that she was responsible for hundreds of deaths? If I was Michael, that would've been it for me. She had no problem admitting that she had a role in the killing of innocent people, she had no problem locking burning people inside a church so she could keep her job, but God forbid anyone finds out that she can't read nor write. If that's not a turn off, then nothing is.
"The Reader" teetered back and forth in the awkward imbalance it had created for itself. Years after Hanna's sentencing, Michael sends her tapes of him reading, which I suppose, is his act of contrition for not telling the court that she lied about writing a document she was incapable of writing. Is this supposed to "parallel" Hanna's guilt?
When they finally meet again after decades, Michael asks her "have you spent a lot of time thinking about the past?" She responds, "you mean with you?" Michael says, incredulously, "no, I didn't mean with me." Here, the filmmakers are devaluing the very romance that they themselves invested in for half of the movie. Why? Because they had no choice. Their main text was overmatched by their subtext.
The final sign of confusion came in the scene between a middle-aged Michael and a holocaust survivor. The woman (played by Lena Olin) tells him that one can not find catharsis in the concentration camps. If he wishes to find catharsis, he should go to the arts. But "there is nothing in the camps", she says. The purpose of this scene, I assume, is to put Hanna's crimes in their proper perspective. But in doing so, the film shoots down its very existence. It's as if the filmmakers were saying, "this story is bullshit, all of this coming-of-age heartbreak, the burden of untold secrets, betrayal, illiteracy, and all our other themes are completely frivolous compared to the experience of being a holocaust victim." In expressing the truth, Daldry exposes his film's serious flaw.
When the holocaust survivor is told about Hanna's illiteracy, she asks Michael sarcastically, "Is that an explanation for her behavior? An excuse?" "No," he replies. This, I imagine, is Daldry and Hare's same answer to the question. After watching their weird and confusing movie, I'm hoping that they mean it.
Ultimately, I think "The Reader" demonstrates the futility of using the holocaust as a metaphor for something that has nothing to do with the holocaust. And I also think it demonstrates that the world isn't ready to recognize Nazis as humans just yet.
Is "The Reader" making us feel sorry for a Nazi? Curiously, I think the critics who made this accusation also give us a glimpse of their answer. To accuse the film of begging sympathy for the devil, you must have sensed something sympathetic in the first place. You must have watched that scene where Hanna was trying to recognize the word "the" as she was teaching herself to read and deduced that it was supposed to be sympathetic.
Because isn't the question "Did I feel sorry for a Nazi?" the one that ultimately matters? In fact, there are many other questions that matter more.
By humanizing someone who did terrible things, do we feel sorry for them?
If we feel sorry for a criminal because she can't read, are we absolving her of her crime?
And finally: when are we going to admit, as a species, that humans - humans who help other humans when they're sick, who enjoy sex, who are fans of literature - are capable of doing horrible, unspeakable, and inexplicably appalling acts? When are we going to stop using the word "evil" as a cop-out and start staring at the very nature of humanity and how it can go horribly wrong?
The filmmakers don't have to answer these questions; they make movies, not history.
Humanity does.
"The Reader" photo from http://worldfilm.about.com/od/photogalleries/ig/The-Reader-Photo-Gallery/Kate-Winslet-in-the-Reader.htm.
"The Remains of the Day" photo from http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800024072/photo/560736.
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