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| READER, THE (2008) - R
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SBD Star Rating:
by LEW IRWIN
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 Stephen Daldry's The Reader was obviously intended as an Important Film, dealing as it does with the Germans' collective guilt over the Holocaust and coming as it does during Oscar-movie season. And virtually every critic treats it as such. An exception is the New York Post's Kyle Smith, who deftly lampoons the movie as if he had graduated magna cum laude from the Mel Brooks School of Mockery. "Think of it as Schindler's Lust," Smith writes, referring to the romance between a German teenager, Michael Berg, played by David Kross, and an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet, who turns out to have been a death-camp guard during World War II. "Those who have daydreamed (and who hasn't?) of a nude Kate Winslet barking, 'You don't matter enough to upset me' or 'Read to me first, den ve make luff!' are in for a treat. But German accents can either be funny or terrifying, and this movie isn't terrifying," Smith remarks. The film raises numerous issues without engaging them, Smith suggests. Finally, he quotes one character, a Holocaust survivor played by Lena Olin who advises the middle-aged Michael, played by Ralph Fiennes, "Go to the theater ... if you want catharsis." Smith concludes: "I was sitting in a theater and I wanted it. It wasn't there." Several other critics make the same point, although less humorously. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times suggests that the scene between Fiennes and Olin, in which Olin lectures the Fiennes character about exploiting the Holocaust amounts to "an admonition that arrives too late for this fatuous film." She sums up by writing that while the photography, performances, and lighting are all first-rate, "You have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn't really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow. ... But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation." Rafer Guzmán in Newsday agrees. "The attractive cast and lovely photography make a great-looking film, but underneath lies a tangle of unappealing ideas," he writes. Nevertheless, several critics appear to endorse its Oscar-worthiness -- even to the point of also endorsing its moral perspective. Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel praises the filmmakers for reaching "for something almost unique in Holocaust stories -- an understanding of the perpetrators, of degrees of guilt and the absolution that no person who lived through that era could possibly feel he or she deserves." And several critics who scorn the movie manage to heap praise on the performance of Kate Winslet. The Associated Press's Christy LeMire writes: "Winslet is in the nearly impossible position of trying to make us feel sympathy for a former Nazi concentration camp guard -- but, being an actress of great range and depth, she very nearly pulls off that feat completely." And the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern comments that Winslet "transcends , by far, the limits of her character's narrow soul." |
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