Nazis, nipples and narrative: a DVD review of `The Reader'

Now that Oscar season is well and truly over, so begins the wave of award-worthy movies hitting our shelves. With the more appealing Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon and Milk released earlier in the year and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button earlier this month, The Reader is the last of the best picture nominees to get a DVD release.

Adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorlesser and directed by Stephen Daldry, the film is set in 1950s Germany where schoolboy Michael Berg begins an affair with much older Hanna Schmitz. In a bold piece of casting the character of Hanna is played by Kate Winslet’s breasts. In fact, Hanna is an ensemble performance from Winslet’s entire anatomy as her nipples and baby-maker spend as much time on screen as her face. Constant nudity aside, this is the role that finally won Winslet the best actress Oscar after five previous nominations. Solid as her performance is in The Reader, she was more deserving of the gold statuette for her role in Iris or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

For much of the first third of the film all you do is watch Hanna and Michael going at `it’, but their affair comes to an abrupt end (much to my stomachs relief) when Hanna moves away. Fast forward some years later and Michael is now a wet-eyed law student sitting in on the trial of seven women, former prison guards for the Nazis during WWII, accused of atrocious war crimes. Much to Michael’s surprise, his cougar Hanna is one of the accused. Thankfully we don’t have to witness another grunting and grinding display between Hanna and Michael, but the cringe-worthy sex scenes soon seem like a fond memory as a bunch of crying and moral lessons ensue. Ralph Fiennes plays an older, yet still weepy, version of Michael who tries to come to terms with what Hanna has done and the effect she has had on his life.

From The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas and Good, to Defiance and Valkyrie, in the past eight months there have been a plethora of WWII related films. With Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds just around the corner, it seems Hollywood has found its latest niche topic. The element that sets The Reader aside from the others lies in its Nazi sympathies. Of course, any film that vaguely smells of Nazi is unpopular with audiences and you get the feeling the encounter with an aging Holocaust survivor at the end of the film has only been thrown in to try and balance the scales slightly.

Sure, the performances are solid; Winslet is convincing as the snarling, rude and frequently nude Hanna and Fiennes brings his experience to the role of older Michael. Up and comer David Kross is good as the young Michael, although, he doesn’t have to do anything except get laid and tear-up so it’s questionable how hard the role would have been to play. The cinematography, a joint effort by Roger Deakins and Chris Menges, is truly beautiful and carries much of the film throughout the slower scenes (and there are plenty of those).

Like an overwhelming majority of Oscar nominated films The Reader is a depressing movie and weighed down by its urgency to say something meaningful about the human condition. Arguably people aren’t going to rent-out a film like The Reader and expect the joyous escapism of Slumdog Millionaire. Yet even as a piece of artsy cinema The Reader is a mediocre ride with not enough `omph’ to really punch the message, whatever that is, home.

First time viewers will be glad they waited for the DVD release and if the feature film hasn’t drained every last morsel of enthusiasm out of you, then there’s plenty of extras to keep you philosophising. They include a feature on adapting the novel for the screen with an intriguing interview of David Hare, the man tasked with writing the script for The Reader. Surprisingly for a film without any special effects or big stunts there are plenty of featurettes for the movie voyeur including a look behind the make-up work, music and production design. The Reader is available to rent or buy on June 24.