What would you do if your government ask you, forced you, to commit war crimes?
There presumably are CIA agents in our country today who are in that position. Did anyone actually kill anybody in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under the war crimes umbrella? I don’t know, and we, the public may never know.
Did people get killed by soldiers ordered to kill in Darfur, in Somalia, in China, in Pakistan? I am sure. By that definition there are hundreds, probably thousands of war criminals alive in the world today. Humans usually go along with the crowd, and if that crowd is a murderous or corrupt government, or a drug cartel, the effect can be catastrophic.
There were hundreds of prison camps in Germany during WWII, and there were thousands of guards. Those guards sometimes committed atrocities in the name of their government. Some of the guards were sadistic and blood hungry and they satisfied their base needs by committing unspeakable deeds at the cost of millions of people who have lost their lives. And make no mistake about it: once you have lost your life you are gone forever, and the murderers still roam the earth, eating, breathing, enjoying art and literature, having sex.
Such is what happens to Hanna Schmitz, the central character in The Reader. We find out that in her early adult life, she must have been between 20 and 25, she was a Nazi prison guard. I am not sure there was any way to be a Nazi prison guard and come away without bloody hands. Hanna, we find, is actually a kind woman, smart, honest, with character and passion, who haplessly got her start in life in a very bad time and a very bad place. She tries to reconcile this with herself and the world around her.
The other protagonist is a school boy, Michael, who studies Latin, Greek and literature. By chance Michael and Hanna meet in Berlin in 1958. She is a conductor in the tram he rides to school. She is 38, he is 15. She seduces him. And here is her other crime in American eyes. Propagating a sexual affair with a minor is a strong taboo in America today, yet it is blatantly going on in this story, for an extended period of time, and we actually get insight into how this situation could arise. We read about it from time to time in the news, when some high school teacher or coach, male or female, gets caught having sex with a student. We shake our heads, partly at the stupidity that allows them to get into it in the first place, partly because we simply don’t understand and can’t come to terms with a situation that seems utterly explainable, is currently morally, ethically and legally acceptable in many countries, was completely normal and acceptable throughout most of history even in the western world and our country, regardless of whether children were victimized in the process.
Sprinkle in illiteracy and the stigma attached to that in modern Germany, which is central to the plot of this movie, add a dash of withholding critical information that could affect the outcome of a trial by a law student to cover his own back, and you have a recipe for a number of complex situations for a story. The Reader takes on two highly controversial concepts, war criminal behavior and sexual relations with adolescents, and wraps them into a powerful story and keeps us riveted. The performances of the three actors, David Kross as Michael as a youth, Ralph Fiennes as Michael as an adult, and Kate Winslett as Hanna, are superb. There is so much guilt and passion in this story on all sides, it would last several lifetimes. Two people are trapped by history into impossible situations that in each case affect their entire lives, mostly adversely. Both grow, and both suffer greatly.
Rating: ****
Based on the novel “Der Vorleser” by Bernhard Schlink.
Check out Ebert’s Review.