The Reader - a challenging film or repetitive manipulation?

I went to see The Reader last night at the Clapham Picturehouse (where you can now purchase tickets from the bar – a good tip if there’s a long queue). Starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, it’s a film of muted brilliance, posing some decidedly interesting questions and doing what all good films should – making you re-assess your beliefs.

Winslet plays an ex-SS guard Hannah Schmitz who now works on the trams in Berlin. Into her life projectile vomits a young Fiennes (played with extraordinary freshness by the young actor), and there begins a passionate affair, for him a sexual discovery, for her a desire to be read to. When we later find out that Hannah was responsible for the death of 300 Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz and takes the fall for her fellow guards due to an embarrassment about her illiteracy, the film takes on a new depth of moral probing. We both pity and detest the institutionalized, ill-educated yet honest Schmitz, and watch her demise with empathy. It is very cleverly done, and yet, somehow, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that this interesting film descended into a holocaust blame movie, and with it all the associations we all have with that time. The long, over-emoted latter scenes involving Fiennes are too indulgent and the suicide of Schmitz too easy. We lose the interesting heart of the film, which is the tormented love between a young, intelligent boy and an older, disturbed woman.