There are any number of ways, from exploitation to trivialization to stultifying pretension, to bungle a film about the Holocaust and its repercussions.
Likewise, the pitfalls and miscalculations marking the road from successful book to botched movie are legion. Both cases represent missed opportunities, which is the most charitable thing one can say about The Reader, Stephen Daldry’s coolly attractive and dismayingly superficial rendering of German author Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel.
A parable of the cowardice and guilt afflicting the German youth born after the war, The Reader is charged by the secret affair between a 15-year-old named Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz, a streetcar conductor more than two decades his senior. It’s 1960 or so, and Germany has successfully masked its wreckage and disgrace beneath a facade of prosperity and complacency.
Hanna (Kate Winslet, who stepped in when a pregnant Nicole Kidman dropped out, halting the production) would seem to hold all the power in the relationship, given her experience and self-sufficiency. After several months she vanishes without a word, leaving Michael stunned, hurt and blaming himself.
He eventually goes on to law school, never quite getting over his first love, and the next time he sees Hanna she’s a defendant in a war-crimes trial. Unable to reconcile his ex-lover with the concentration camp guard described in court, Michael (a poorly chosen David Kross, too old to pass for high school age and too young to convince as a law student) makes a solitary outing to a former camp in a futile attempt to come to grips with the mass murders he’s just realizing are his legacy.
In the ensuing years, Michael can neither slip nor solidify his bond with Hanna. As played by the dapper and oh-so-tastefully haunted Ralph Fiennes (still suffering for his cinematic sins as Amon Goeth?), Michael numbly goes through the motions of living.
The novel is narrated by the adult Michael, standing in for an entire generation of emotionally stunted underachievers, with lacerating self-awareness. The crux of Schlink’s book is the unacknowledged effect of the Holocaust — and the mysterious malignancy of unearned guilt — on those who came of age in postwar Germany.
You’ll need a microscope to find that theme in the film, which dishes up all the plot details but utterly fails at conveying Michael or Hanna’s interior lives. Daldry and screenwriter David Hare chose not to use a voice-over, which might have had the effect of further distancing us from Michael but would have illuminated his confusion, pain and sense of failure.
For this is Michael’s saga of poisoned dreams and unfulfilled potential, offhand cruelty and sanctioned injustice. Casting a movie star in the role of Hanna, a nondescript worker with a secret, inevitably throws off the balance.
Hare and Daldry made dozens of small but equally crucial changes to the novel, of which maybe two are improvements. Perhaps it’s pointless, or missing the point, to kvetch, for it’s almost a given that a novel’s admirers will be disappointed by its transformation to the screen.
But The Reader, with its art-directed soft-core sex and intrusive score and ineffectual dash of highbrow Holocaust honor-paying, is a cowardly dodge. If a German filmmaker had adapted Schlink’s novel with the same careful elusiveness and artful vagueness—particularly in the bruising wake of Sophie Scholl, Downfall and The Counterfeiters — the hooting would be deafening.
That the well-meaning filmmakers are British, backed by American producers, is no reason to be more forgiving.
The Reader opens Dec. 25.
The abridged version
