The Reader 7

Here are some of my questions: If Hannah was not intellectually curious, why did she take so readily to Homer, Chekov and Mark Twain? If she was intellectually curious, why had she not taught herself to read, or asked someone to teach her, before she was 60? If she was a shy recluse, why did she pounce so readily on the kid, and keep pouncing? If she wasn’t a recluse, why did she have no friends in the world, especially among the guards she served with in the war? Where did Hannah and the kid find the time, in one summer, to read aloud so many books, have sex and a shower every day, do homework, work a full-time job and still escape the notice of his friends and family? How did the kid spend so much intimate time with her and not discover that she was illiterate? Then there are the questions not involving plot details, but more serious ones involving human motivation: what were Hannah’s feelings toward the kid? Why did she abruptly quit the relationship, her apartment and her job? Why did the kid, now a young law student, not save Hannah by telling the court that she was illiterate? Why, later in life, did he send her tape recordings of all the books they had read, and more? Why was he cold toward her when she was about to be released from prison? And finally, why did she hang herself? Taking on the larger issue the film obliquely raises, how culpable was Hannah for the death of the concentration-camp inmates?

            I have some answers to the last set of questions, but my wife has others, and it is precisely this thought-provoking nature that is the strength of The Reader. The need to search for explanations to some of the mysteries is, conversely, a weakness. Kate Winslet is compelling as the bottled-up Hannah, but without a bit more background it is hard to accept a character with so much contradiction: beautiful, erotic and brazen, yet friendless at home, on the job, in the war, in prison. Ralph Fiennes, on the other hand, floods the screen with a plethora of facial expressions in every five-second shot, needlessly underlining the oh-so-serious nature of the matters before us. By contrast, a better film like The Lives of Others seems to be inhabited by real people, not actors.

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