The Reader

PERFECTLY REALISED: Kate Winslet in The Reader - a superb performance in a superb film.

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With The Reader and The Hours under their belts, director Stephen Daldry and scriptwriter David Hare obviously have the best and most difficult of all niches - turning marvellous, troubling novels into unmissable movies.

Both of these movies find their way into that small part of your brain which is programmed to remember them always.

Bernhard Schlink's The Reader seemed a very German novel - spare, beautifully written and authentic, yet with an iciness at its heart which left me admiring rather than loving it. While the movie has the same feeling, it also manages to capture the viewer emotionally. This is in large part because of the superb, academy- award performance of the genius that is Kate Winslet. Thank goodness Nicole Kidman (who, when playing stressed, can look weak and whey-faced) pulled out: a pale, washed-out Winslet seems born to play Hanna - 17-year-old Michael's older woman who turns out to be the carrier of two extraordinary secrets. When Ralph Fiennes appears as the grown-up Michael, he is Winslet's perfect partner: these are two damaged people who hide that damage behind cool, formal demeanours.

For its first half, this movie views a little as your traditional coming-of-age movie, with Michael (a well-cast David Kross) finding (slightly improbably) first love in the arms of Hanna. It is when the film moves into its second stage eight years later, when Michael (now Fiennes) is a law student observing Nazi war trials, meets up with Hanna again that the movie really begins to pack its punch.

What unravels is complex, and we are gently nudged towards examining cause and effect - or, more explicitly, consequence - in multiple situations.

Hanna's trial was the most riveting part of this movie. The scenes in the courtroom, with the contrasts in the behaviour of both those on trial and the law students watching, evoked what it is to be human. Never did the line "because it was my job" carry so much depth. You are not being asked to condone the appalling things we do to each other, but you are being asked to put yourself in another's shoes, and at least attempt to understand.

This is what great literature asks of you. So what could be more appropriate than to have reading as a significant theme in this movie?

The Reader is about how very ordinary the most shameful things can be. As both an intellectual and emotional experience, this perfectly realised movie is one that will stay with me for a long time.

THE READER
(M)
(124min)
* * * * *
Directed by Stephen Daldry, writer David Hare, starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross.

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