Story Time

Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is an adaptation of a semiautobiographical novel – an Oprah’s Book Club pick, no less – by Bernard Schlink.

The film tells the story of Michael Berg (David Kross), a 15-year-old boy who falls ill on his way home and is looked after by Hanna Schmitz (a powerhouse Kate Winslet), a woman twice his age with whom he later embarks on a passionate affair.

Their relationship is as consuming as it is illicit. And The Reader explores it unabashedly.

“The kid,” as she calls him (at first dismissively and then affectionately), and her begin to meet after he comes looking for her a few months after they met. He pays her a shy visit to thank her, and she seduces in a way that I could only hope to imitate someday.

Awkwardness gives way to passion, and soon they begin meeting everyday, first for sex, and then, after she alters their dynamic, for a little reading of the classics (on his part, for her)…and then sex.

But then, after one memorable summer together, Hanna up and leaves town without explanation, and the kid is brokenhearted.

Cut to almost a decade later, Michael, now a young law student, is observing Nazi war trials, when he finds his former lover again, in court as a defendant. She is on trial for a hideous crime, refusing to defend herself, and he starts to realize Hanna is guarding a secret she considers to be more shameful than murder.

There’s plenty that goes, say, unanswered in The Reader, but I thought that it made a pretty powerful statement, especially when a grown-up Michael (Ralph Fiennes) asked Hanna what she’d learn from her experience.

It turns out the answer is as complicated as the lives of these two characters, and quite startling and intriguing, just as the slightly uneven film Daldry (The Hours) has delivered. Hanna’s secret may carry the story, but Winslet carries the film, though, and for that it must be watched.

My Rating ***

Photo: The Weinstein Company.