Reading between the lines

Okay, no image on today's blog because it's too darn hard to find. It's been a few days now since I saw the film I'm about to talk about, but hopefully I'll still be able to get my point across.

The last movie of Winter Break ended up being The Reader, a lesser known film starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. I first heard about it because it's generating some Oscar buzz for Kate, and then the trailer for it was shown in one of the films we saw earlier - probably Milk or Frost/Nixon.

I thought The Reader was an incredible, beautiful film. It's a bit hard to describe - one of those 'go see it if it sounds good to you'-type movies. Basically, it's about a teenage boy who has an affair with a woman, who then (a bit later) disappears. (During the affair, he reads to her a lot - hence the title). Years later, he finds her again, but it's in a courtroom and she's a convicted SS guard, being held for war crimes (as I understood it). The story movies into his later life, and hers, and follows their respective stories.

It's basically a look at post-WW2 in Germany, and it reminded me a great deal of the Dutch novel we read for IB English last year, The Assault, by Harry Mulisch. (True, different country, but similar theme). Incidentally, The Reader is based on a book as well.

The time after the war was a horrible time in Germany, it seems to me. Everyone was faced with the question of guilt. Am I guilty? Even if I just went along with everything for my own self-protection, am I guilty? Who can I blame? In the Assault, there's a phrase at one point: "Was everyone both guilty and not guilty? Was guilt innocent and innocence guilty?" This pretty well summarizes The Reader.

See, it's clear that the woman (Hannah, I believe her name was) did horrible things to Jewish prisoners. But early on, she's painted as a good person - she's kind, and the main character, Michael, really loves her. She took a job as a guard for the SS because she needed a job... so is she a guilty person of the horrible things she did? Or is she a victim or circumstance?

During the trial, one of Michael's fellow law students begins asking questions as to the fairness of trying Hannah and the five other guards she was convicted with. If these women were convicted, he argued, they were just being made into scapegoats. If not, however, they were letting crimes go unpunished.

I'd very much like to see the film again to see what else I could get out of it. It raised many questions about the value of justice and the law, the true meaning of guilt and innocence, and the nature of the post-WW2 recovery for citizens involved. I'd also like to read the book that this was adapted from, mainly because it was a bit hard to follow Hannah's motivations in the movie, and I wonder if the book reveals more.

Well, I'm sure I had more to say about this film originally, but it's escaped me now, so I'd best move on with my evening.