The Reader,"" directed by Stephen Daldry (""The Hours"") and starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, was one of this season's biggest question marks at the Oscar nominations. Although Winslet's performance makes her a frontrunner for the year's best actress award, a general outcry resulted from the film's best picture nomination, a slot many feel should have gone to ""Revolutionary Road,"" ""Wall-E"" or ""The Dark Knight."" The complaint: The Academy once again fell for the Oscar-baiting Holocaust film.
But is ""The Reader"" a Holocaust film? It shouldn't be. There is much more present in David Hare's screenplay, about a 15-year-old's affair with a lonely woman who is convicted for war crimes years later, but the script loses its way with a last-minute attempt to make a statement about the Holocaust. At its outset, ""The Reader"" tells a gripping, Oscar-caliber story that falls off halfway through, paralyzed by its own plot twists and left meaningless.
If done right, the film's meaning would have easily come to the surface - themes about literacy and the ignorance present during Nazi Germany - using the Holocaust as a periphery, not as its center. And at first it does. In 1950s West Germany, 15-year-old Michael (played wonderfully by David Kross, who should get higher billing than Fiennes) becomes sick on a street corner, until a 30-something streetcar fare collecter named Hanna (Winslet) helps him. The charity quickly turns into a passionate but impossible affair that lasts the summer. Although the end of the affair breaks Michael's heart, he goes on to become a law student and attends a war crimes trial.
It is at the trial that Michael sees Hanna as one of the defendants and realizes what he knows about her could help her case.
It is a brilliant setup that has the potential to tell a more provocative story than ""Benjamin Button,"" ""Slumdog Millionaire"" or even ""Doubt,"" but after the film's first climax, it starts to veer downward. The motivated characters suddenly become inactive victims of the circumstances around them and trudge through the rest of the movie until the adult Michael meets with the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. It is a dangerously desperate move. The screenplay attempts to whack its audience over the head with obvious statements and generalizations, a far cry from the grace and subtlety of the first half of the film.
The story is told through flashbacks from the perspective of adult Michael, played lifelessly by Fiennes, who mopes and sighs in front of the camera. It almost seems insulting that he is credited alongside the superior Winslet - she is truly phenomenal. Although perhaps a little too pretty to play such a gritty role, Winslet gives a performance that may finally win her the big prize on Oscar night. Daldry gives beautiful direction to the film, creating a post-war Germany that, (like Hanna) is both ravaged and resurfacing with life.
Perhaps ""The Reader"" does not belong in this year's top five, but it should be noted for its courage and for the story it is trying to tell. One wonders what the film's possibilities could have been if the storyhad been told to its full potential.
GRADE: B
