Review: Faults Aside, 'Reader' Still Worth Look

'The Reader' (R)(out of four)

A whole generation of German children came of age in the wake of the Holocaust -- caught in a bubble of evil they did not cause and could barely even understand.

Michael Berg (played in his younger years by David Kross, and in his older years by Ralph Fiennes) was one such teenager during the darkest days of the German nation, forming a strong bond with a woman who would later be implicated in heinous war crimes. As she is brought to stand trial for her crimes, he is confronted with the fact that good people got swept up in an evil movement.

His conflicted sense of identity and understanding is representative of a whole generation who watched family friends and neighbors, people of good standing, lose their soul to the Nazis.

A faithful adaptation of the renowned book by Bernhard Schlink, and a triumph of acting on all levels, what nevertheless holds "The Reader" back is its breadth. As it spans the decades and the issues, the movie is ultimately unable to stay in one place for long enough to breathe enough life into three-dimensional characters. It might be one of those rare, but unmistakable cases, where a book covers so much and in such detail that it cannot be successfully adapted for the screen.

The setting is West Berlin, circa 1958. Michael is a boy coming down with hepatitis -- though he has yet to discover his illness. Vomiting on the side of the road, he's tended to by Hanna (Kate Winslet), a reclusive tram operator who - we later learn - is illiterate. When a healed Michael is finally allowed to leave his bedroom, he returns to thank this kind stranger and finds himself attracted to her. She senses his interest and goes to bed with a young man she has no business seducing.

Hanna is a rough, fiery, chiseled woman. One can tell she's endured hardships that have given her a thick outer shell. But as Michael starts to share her bed, reading to Hanna at her request, we see a softer side to this woman. She's struggling to get by, tough on the surface but vulnerable underneath. Working on a tram in West Berlin, tearing tickets, her bosses want to promote her -- to give her a desk job where her illiteracy where surely become a liability. Michael is in love with Hanna, but then one day she is gone. Fade to black.

Years later, Michael is a college student studying law. His professor arranges for the class to witness a war crimes trial, now in progress. Sitting in the rafters, a slightly older Michael goes white as he realizes that Hanna is the defendant in the case -- accused of locking a group of Jews in a burning church, precipitating mass murder years before he had ever met her.

She is called out, for writing the orders that led to the deaths. But Michael, all but convulsing as he emotionally listens to this testimony that changes everything about the woman he loved, knows that the illiterate Hanna couldn't have written or read any orders. He confesses to his professor, but is hesitant to act. She was a Nazi, she was there as the atrocities were committed, so what does it matter what she did and did not write? Is she not guilty? Are there gradations to the concept of pure evil?

Michael eventually attempts to reconnect with her -- still feeling some pangs of love for a woman he considers a monster. He still longs to read to her, yet cannot bring himself to help her. At the center of his struggles are the notions of forgiveness and acceptance. Can we accept that good people have done bad things, or are some things too heinous to forgive?

In "The Reader," we appreciate the moral quandary, even as we realize that we cannot fully embrace these thinly written characters. While we are immersed in the first chapter of this story, becoming embroiled in the young love of an older woman and a younger man, we nevertheless watch the second and third acts from a distance.

We observe, but can't quite feel.

Not that it is Winslet's fault. In a ravishing performance, she makes tough seem sexy and makes certain guilt seem intriguingly uncertain. We see her reach out, in her own proud way, to Michael and then witness the ways in which fear lead her to retreat. Winslet helps us to see how Hanna can at once be honorable in court, but fallible on the battle field. As a lonely old woman, desperately craving escape in jail, Hanna transforms into the face of despondency.

Yet the further the story goes, the more she recedes into the background. "The Reader" is a tale of love destroyed, of the ways in which the next generation will fail to cope with the ghosts of the past. So perhaps it was unavoidable, that the emotions and the intimacy would drain away from this story, as Michael's love dissolves to confusion.

It might even be safe to say that this was the only way that Schlink's "The Reader" could be filmed. Still, one wishes it were just a little bit more.