Review: The Reader

As promised yesterday, here's the explanation for my rage-filled burst against Kate Winslet's Golden Globes win for "The Reader." Now, don't get me wrong. She's excellent in it, but the film is far from excellent, and I have an issue with terrible films winning awards for good performances. Is that unfair? Maybe. However, when films win awards, people seek them out and see them. That's the problem. "The Reader" is an insult to everybody's intelligence, because it's made to look a lot more provocative and intelligent than it really is.

The premise appears to go deeper than it truly does. Michael (David Kross) is a young man living in pre-WWII Germany. One day, he collapses while attempting to return home from school, and a mysterious woman helps him. He returns to her apartment months later to bring her flowers and thank her, but sees her getting dressed. He can't help but watch, and she gets angry. He makes good with her, and they end up having an affair. At the end of their summer together, she disappears. Heartbroken even years later, Michael goes off to law school, where his class goes to observe a Nazi war crimes trial. Lo and behold, Hanna (Winslet) is on trial as a guard at Auschwitz who let 300 Jews die in a burning church. There's also a lot of jumping back to the present, where a grown Michael (Ralph Fiennes) is recalling these events.

The film has an intriguing premise, and starts intrestingly. Kross and Winslet are nude for quite literally the first half of the movie, having sex pretty much the entire time. You can see why the Weinstein Company put the film out; not a lot of other studios would take on a film this sexually charged. The trouble, however, is that there's no eroticism to their sex. It could be argued that this is to illustrate the detachment of Hanna, I understand that completely, but no filmmaker fills half his film with sex purely to make a point. That much onscreen sexuality is designed to shock and tittilate, I'm sorry.

Then, there is The Turn. I've been referring to it with such capital-letter drama ever since I bought it. If ever there was an example of a film's revelation killing the movie instantly, this is it. I actually figured it out about twenty minutes in, but I was dearly hoping I was wrong. The twist, which I'm not going to spoil, is supposed to be a heartbreaking shock designed to connect Michael and Hanna through a lifetime, and a game-changing secret that could save her from going to prison, but instead it's just silly. I mean, laugh-out-loud ridiculous, especially when the film plays it with a completely straight face.

I understand that there is a market for this film, and I know people who have thoroughly enjoyed it. I'll be the first to admit that this isn't my kind of film. Like I said about "Doubt" a few weeks ago, the film is designed to grab at awards and devastate a very specific audience, and just so my words aren't misunderstood, that audience is high-minded filmgoers who don't really attend movies to enjoy them anymore. The truth is that this film isn't aggravating, or provocative, or any other adjective. It's not really memorable enough to warrant such terms.