Old Yorker

Stephen Daldry (2008)

Stephen Daldry’s third feature, based on a novel by Bernhard Schlink, prompts the question of whether it’s morally acceptable on the part of an artist to make a Nazi war criminal a potentially sympathetic figure in a work of fiction.   When I saw the film (which is dedicated to the memory of its two producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack), I knew nothing about the critical reception of The Reader, either in print or on screen, beyond what I’d read in The New Yorker.  A reference to the book some months ago and Anthony Lane’s recent review of the film both seemed to answer the above question in the negative.  I’ve since read other, similar complaints about The Reader.  There are certainly aspects of the screen version which may reasonably cause offence and it’s unsatisfying in important ways, although I still found it an absorbing piece of work.

The Reader spans a period of 37 years – from 1958 to 1995, from which point in time Michael Berg, a middle-aged lawyer in Berlin, remembers his affair, as an adolescent, with Hanna Schmitz, a mid-thirtyish tram conductress in his home city of Neustadt.  Their relationship ends when Hanna disappears suddenly, without explanation to Michael.  Eight years later, in Heidelberg, Michael is one of a group of law students taken by their professor to attend the trial of a group of six female guards at Auschwitz.  One of them is Hanna.  Michael has good reason to think he can disprove the accusation being made in court that Hanna was the other women’s leader and the author of the report they wrote on the burning of a church in which 300 Jews died.  (It’s the memoir of one of the few survivors of this outrage that appears to be the source of evidence against Hanna and the others.)  Michael’s nerve fails him, however; he keeps quiet and Hanna is sentenced to life imprisonment.

Another ten years pass, by which time Michael’s marriage to a woman who’s already a state prosecutor (I wasn’t clear whether this was the student who’d been his girlfriend at university) has gone wrong.  He takes their young daughter to Neustadt to break the news to his mother.  During her affair with Michael, Hanna liked him to read to her – from the works of literature he was studying at school.  Back at the family home, he retrieves the books from which he read and makes audio-cassettes, which he sends to Hanna in prison.   Listening to the tapes transforms her world:  she knows their source – they bring Michael, as well as literature, back into her life.  Hanna also uses the tapes, in conjunction with copies of books that she borrows from the prison library, to teach herself to read and write.   When she writes to Michael, he doesn’t respond but keeps sending tapes.   In 1988, the prison governess contacts him to inform him that Hanna is about to be released (after 22 years in jail), and to ask him if – as her only contact in the outside world – he will take responsibility for Hanna.   They meet, for the first time in 30 years, when he visits her to explain that he’s arranged accommodation and found a job for her.   He asks if and, if so, what she thinks about the past but is careful to keep his distance emotionally.  On the day she is to be released, Hanna piles up the library that she’s accumulated in her cell, climbs onto it and hangs herself.

She leaves a note for Michael, which is read to him by the prison governess and which asks him to give Hanna’s life savings to Ilana, the author of the memoir whose evidence was crucial at Hanna’s trial.  Michael visits Ilana in New York, where she now lives.  She’s not interested in modifying her feelings about Hanna and she won’t accept the money – but she does take the tea caddy in which it’s contained.  Ilana recalls having her own tea caddy, in which she kept her ‘treasures’ and which was confiscated at Auschwitz.  The film ends with Michael’s meeting up again with the daughter from whom he’s become virtually estranged, and taking her to Hanna’s grave.  He starts to recall the beginning of his relationship with Hanna.  This is a neat plot.  It may be that this neatness increases the unease – even distaste – that The Reader has caused some readers and viewers to feel.

At her trial, Hanna is (as I understood it) entirely truthful about what she did as a Nazi official – except that she falsely admits to writing the report on the church fire because she’s ashamed to admit her illiteracy.   The implication that she’s more ashamed of this than of her crimes helps make her, I think, a genuinely challenging character.  Her practical, professional approach means that she shows no contrition either for systematically, regularly eliminating numbers of women and children in the camp (space considerations) or for not releasing the Jews trapped in the church (she was a guard:  to have released prisoners would have been a dereliction of duty and ‘caused chaos’).   When Michael presses her, on seeing her again in 1988, about the past, Hanna first asks if he means their affair; when he explains that he means an earlier past, she says that whatever she might think won’t bring back the dead.  She seems to be rationalising her inability to reflect on and regret her past actions; and her seduction of the 15-year- old Michael is coldly exploitative (and presumably illegal).   Michael may not be an admirable character but his betrayal of Hanna is the consequence of human weakness and understandable ambivalence.  Hanna’s actions in Auschwitz and in supervising the church fire are inhuman.    The film is clear-eyed about the relative moral failings of Michael and Hanna and, to that extent, above reproach.  But The Reader illustrates the difficulties of translating a novel much of which (I would guess) takes place inside the characters’ heads – and of what happens when those characters are brought to life by actors who may carry the residue of earlier roles, and who vary in their expressive power and in how strongly they connect with an audience.

Daldry is working again from an adapted screenplay by David Hare.  Hare did a masterly job in transcribing Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, in which Daldry handled the large cast, full of big names, superbly.  The Reader isn’t such a success in either respect.  Unless Hare has greatly simplified the novel, the narrative here is less complex than that of Cunningham’s novel.  But many of the characters in The Hours were intellectuals or at least people to whom it was natural to verbalise their feelings, either in conversation or in interior monologue.  The decision to eschew an obvious technique of that kind when it would be less natural to the characters in The Reader is admirable in principle but it has the effect of increasing the pressure on the actors to express what’s going on inside Michael and Hanna.  We can read from their remarks and behaviour the moral issues raised by the story but that’s as far as the screenplay goes.  If The Reader were directed in a way that kept the characters’ motives opaque, that might (reasonably) shift the onus of moral judgment onto the audience.   But it’s done as a drama that’s humanly revelatory and it’s therefore the qualities of the performers that skew the material emotionally.

I’ve not seen all Kate Winslet’s films and she has appeared in some stinkers that I have seen (Titanic, Enigma, Little Children) but I don’t remember seeing a performance from her that’s less than good.   Audiences respond to Winslet’s naturally truthful quality and her warmth.  This obviously creates a problem when she’s playing a woman who’s concealing important things about her past and who lacks the sensibility to feel, consciously at least, the moral weight of her actions.  The problem here is not that Winslet is miscast but that, because she’s instinctively sympathetic towards the characters she plays, she’s looking for, and often suggests, a degree of humanity in Hanna that contradicts the evidence of the script.  And since it’s not easy to dislike Winslet, it’s not surprising if people think The Reader is giving a Nazi too fair a hearing.  In spite of this – and it’s a serious limitation – I think Winslet gives another good performance.  In the 1958 part of the film, Hanna’s desire for sex with a boy whose age makes him an innocent – and recalls an age at which she was innocent – is a fairly obvious but convincing indication of how Hanna’s past gets to her at an unconscious level.  The same could be said of the attention she gives to bathing and washing (herself and Michael).  Winslet convincingly suggests a woman whose sexual appetite is both a natural part of her and an expression of her determination to live in the present.  In court, she’s less convincing; her beautiful candour is too nobly distinctive from the other women on trial (all of them physically well cast, with hatchet faces only slightly modified by two decades of bourgeois reorientation).  But Winslet has some very good moments in custody and prison.  When Hanna hears, during her trial, that she has a visitor (this is the point at which Michael chickens out), the look on her face that combines hopefulness and fearfulness seems dead right.  After their reunion, when Michael’s taken his leave, she stands an inert, shapeless figure – this physical withering (more than the not very brilliant wrinkly make-up) is in eloquent contrast to the sexually greedy woman of the early scenes.

Whereas Kate Winslet plays Hanna from start to finish, the actors in the other significant roles change over the course of the years:  David Kross is Michael in the 1958 and 1966 sequences and Ralph Fiennes takes over in 1976;   Ilana is played by Alexandra Maria Lara at the trial and by Lena Olin in the 1988 scene with Michael.   There’s a moment, as Ilana is about to give evidence, when she flashes a humorous glance in Michael’s direction.   Although naturally very different from what we then see in the witness box, this look uncannily anticipates the self-possession of the older Ilana.  Lena Olin has just the one scene but she certainly makes an impression; her Ilana is a materially successful woman who uses a professional graciousness to mute (but it actually gives a greater edge to) her resentment at what Michael is telling her.  Things don’t work nearly so well with the playing of Michael himself.  David Kross, who was 17 when filming began, has a physical presence and immediacy as the teenager; the fact that he’s not emotionally expressive isn’t that much of a problem at this stage – we can accept Michael as a tabula rasa.  However, Kross looks older than fifteen when David is fifteen and too young as the law student in his early twenties; and he’s no more expressive at that age – he just seems more miserable.  I suppose this is some kind of bridge to the Ralph Fiennes incarnation but that’s as much continuity as there is.  (Fiennes looks too old as the 33-year-old Michael; when we see Michael in his late forties and early fifties it’s the only time that the actor in the role looks the right age.)

I liked Ralph Fiennes in his early film roles (Schindler’s List, Quiz Show, The English Patient), which suggested an actor with the potential for a considerable range of parts.  He hasn’t so far delivered on that promise.  Fiennes can certainly do miserable but his look of a man in mourning for his life has become too familiar (The End of the Affair, Spider, The Constant Gardener) ­­– and it’s an enervated misery.  Fiennes’s characters look regretfully and smile sadly at the people they come into contact with – not much more.   His first appearance here isn’t helped by the shots of Michael’s breakfast preparations and apartment which introduce his arrival on the scene:  a pure white egg in a pure white eggcup on a spotless white plate in a room that is all neat shelving and stripped floorboards – we get the message that the occupier must be trying to put a spotless front on things even before we see Fiennes’ face.   He reads the books he records for Hanna with a beautiful, discreet melancholy but that’s predictable too.

Stephen Daldry’s direction of the actors in The Reader is less consistently effective than in The Hours, although some of those in small parts come through strongly (the co-defendants at the trial, Burghard Klaussner as the trial judge, Linda Bassett as the prison governess).   As Michael’s law professor, Bruno Ganz – although he’s appeared in English language films previously – seems surprisingly uncomfortable speaking his lines.  These are often overemphasised and sometimes stressed in the wrong place but Ganz is facially much more communicative than either Fiennes or Kross.  There are some faults in the storytelling too (the omissions here may be Hare’s rather than Daldry’s).  For example, in the early stages of his affair with Hanna, Michael seems to be isolated at school but, particularly after the bout of scarlet fever for which he’s sickening when he first encounters Hanna, closely monitored by his family.  Later on, he has plenty of friends of his own age, to whom his frequent disappearances from after- school activities, are a new mystery;  there’s no indication of what Michael’s cover story is, either to friends or parents, for the short holiday that he takes with Hanna.   When he returns to Neustadt in 1976, we learn from his mother that he’s become so cut off from his family that he didn’t attend his father’s funeral, a level of isolation that’s unexplained.

A more salient misjudgment in Daldry’s direction occurred sufficiently often to leave me wondering if it was intentional (if it was, I don’t see the point of it).   He tends to hold shots which you feel should be fleeting moments – as when Michael, for the first time, is watching Hanna undress and she sees him looking – and to elide moments of crucial visual recognition.  Examples of the latter are:  when Michael, after recovering from his illness, takes flowers to Hanna to thank her for helping him when he was sick – this is only their second meeting and the first lasted only a minute or two in the street but she appears to react as if they already know each other well; when, after he’s run out of the flat, he gets to see Hanna again by travelling on the tram she’s working on, and they don’t register each other at all.  At the trial, David Kross indicates recognition of the woman in the dock when he hears her name Hanna (not even Hanna Schmitz) rather than when he sees her face or listens to her voice.  It’s hard enough anyway to believe that Michael hasn’t read her full name in a newspaper or that the names of the women on trial haven’t been discussed among the students and their professor before arrival at court.  Even if you can swallow that, the falseness of this moment of recognition is baffling.  And perhaps, and most crucially, there are moments when Daldry treats the character in a way that justifies resentment of the benign presentation of an SS guard.  (I don’t see how this can be regarded as unacceptable in principle:  at least, there’s no other category of screen villain I can think of that’s regarded as beyond the pale in this way.)  When Hanna is learning to read, the director presents the moment as heartwarming – the way it might be presented in a film about an illiterate whose past life has been innocuous.   It’s one thing to dare to portray a Nazi war criminal with sympathy.  It must be a step too far to sentimentalise her.

4 January 2009