The Reader. One fine movie. I went on behest of my degenerate buddies who couldn’t stop talking about the Kate Winslet sex scenes and constant moaning about where was a woman like that when we were teenagers. Silly us, the movie was only slightly and I do mean slightly about the Kate Winslet involvement with a young boy of 15–the sex is almost beside the point. .
It is really quite a story. The movie holds you. The boy does lots of reading to Hanna, Kate’s character. It really doesn’t become clear until later down the road what the “reading” is all about, hence the movie title.
The intimacy ends. The movie moves on. In a kind of happenstance, the adult character played by Ralph Fiennes, now in law school, witnesses Hanna’s trial as a Nazi war criminal. Obviously, as a young boy, he had no idea and now faced with facts known only to him, he has a choice to make regardlng her. Basically his ethics are overwhelmed with collective German guilt. He fails to do the “right” thing. Down the road, at least in my interpretation, he attempts to make up for it by again becoming her “reader” and that is basically all I can tell without possibly giving away the movie. SEE THE MOVIE.
Is it the best movie of the year? I don’t know but for me, it cements again one thing for sure--Americans are good at: making movies. A very complicated and unweildly story and yet these movie makers succeeded in tying together a very cohesive, pensive, and timely story.
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