The Reader

What's Good About It

This is a pretty weird picture. It has a NAZI SS camp guard as a leading character, and it's a woman - and she's pretty predatory about sex as as well when she seduces a young German boy after the war, which is essentially where it starts. The horrible past only comes to light later in the story. It's a good ploy because it forces the audience to reckon with the humanity of the woman played by Kate Winslet, before we have to reckon with the horrible past with the main character.

Turns out it is an almighty emotional that requires two actors to anguish their way through the film, one of the Ralph Fiennes who was of course once upon a time that other horrible NAZI on screen, Amon Goeth.

It's quite clever in that it captures a side of the historical taboo through the libido and carnal pleasure sort of angle. The Germans in this story have to struggle with the NAZI past to they break, but it's not clear what happens beyond such flagellation.

What's also good is that the post-war trials of former NAZIs are depicted in the film and you get the feeling that yes, if you know how such trials are going to go, then they likely are show trials no different to the kind of trials they have in say, Communist China or Burma under military rule.

What's Bad About It

This is a really, really good film except I'm not sure you can de-politicise the Germany-Nazi-Holocaust parts of history to the extent and pretend that only personal moral concerns remain. I'm sorry, but I'm just not that naive. Nazism is/was politics. They didn't do all the stuff they did for nothing - they were hyper-political about the how and why of the Holocaust and everything else they went and did that we disapprove of today. In the same vein, anybody who was a Nazi is/was political.

You don't just sidestep that. And politics does go to where morality cannot stomach, quite often. But then, so does the law.

That may just be my reading of it, but the film goes towards having Bruno Ganz's character mounting the argument that the law has limitations and we still thirst for justice. And yet we're left with the impression that there were good Germans and bad Germans and we'd all be all right if we can just lock up the bad Germans.

What's Interesting About It

There's something almost stupid about a film that has NAZIs and the Holocaust as a back-story and then the leading actress who goes extensively nude in the film ends up with an Oscar. The same actress who joked about such phenomena in 'Extras' to Ricky Gervais, that is.

I mean, are we that dumb? Are they that dumb? It's a good film and all, but come on people! Winslet's done better work than this. Isn't this like Holocaust-Porn, the worst of its kind since 'Life Is Beautiful'?

It's like they show the ciphers of NAZIs and Holocaust and everybody has to go running to praise the thing. It's silly.