As for the fate of the 300 Jewish camp prisoners that led to Hanna's trial, well, that's another Holocaust film, not this one. Chronologically scrambled by Hare, the story becomes a paean to the glories of literacy and a facile inquiry into collective German guilt. Even though Winslet can adjust, brilliantly and almost imperceptibly, any character's emotional temperature, Hanna remains a knotty abstraction, not a dimensional being. Lawrence to her, always before intercourse, never after. Hanna and Michael spend many stolen hours together, as he reads Homer and D.H. Adapted by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, Hare's colleague on the portentous film version of "The Hours," "The Reader" risks fraudulence the second Winslet's Hanna scoops up the ailing Michael (he has scarlet fever in the film, hepatitis in the book), points to the tub in her stern little flat (beautifully lighted by two ace cinematographers, Roger Deakins and Chris Menges) and flatly declares, "Take off your clothes." Visually, the film doesn't feel lived-in or textured it's all neat and tidy and on-the-nose. Even in the scenes dominated by Winslet, and in a strong late appearance by Lena Olin as a camp survivor, you never quite believe the way anything unfolds. I'm afraid it needed a different set of interpreters to make any emotional sense of it onscreen. Told, coolly, from Michael's perspective, the novel was hugely popular as well as controversial worldwide and an Oprah's Book Club selection besides. She stands before him, a shell of a woman, still laden with secrets.
Kate winslet the reader trial#
One day at a war crimes trial of female Auschwitz guards, he hears the name of his former lover cited along with several other women. Years later Michael, played by young German actor David Kross, is a Heidelberg law student. With a heavy gait and the eye of a sorrowful predator, Winslet portrays Hanna Schmitz, who disappears from young Michael's life as mercurially as she entered it. Can a formidable actress redeem a pile of solemn erotic kitsch? Kate Winslet answers that one as honestly as she can in the film version of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel "The Reader," the tale of a 15-year-old West German boy who, in 1958, embarks on an affair with a 36-year-old trolley conductor with more on her mind, and in her past, than she admits.
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