Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo

I’ve seen more than my fair share of movies whose characters and conflicts develop against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Francisco’s favorite movie of all time is “Schindler’s List” and he considers himself something of a Holocaust scholar; I do believe we’ve watched every film and documentary that’s been made about the Holocaust. (And there are a great many.)

It was thus inevitable that we’d eventually see “The Reader.”

Briefly, the plot: A 15 year old boy in post war Germany meets a stranger who helps him home after she finds him sick in the doorway of her building. After he recovers from a bout of scarlet fever, Michael returns to Hanna’s building with a bouquet of flowers, intending to thank her for her help, if not her warm kindness (she’s a rather cold, brusque woman).

But darn those intentions! Shortly after passing her the bouquet, Michael and Hanna find themselves stripping. And shortly after that? Well… exactly what you’re thinking.

There’s a minor twist that becomes critical to the movie: Hanna’s got a bit of a fetish. Specifically, she wants Michael to read to her. He’s an erudite young man with good literary taste, and Hanna makes a round of reading the requisite foreplay for their rolls in the sack. He indulges her, reading The Odyssey, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chekhov’s The Lady with the Little Dog to his older sexual tutor.

Their fling lasts a summer, as flings usually do. Hanna gets a promotion, gets moody, and leaves without warning, abandoning her apartment and her relationship with Michael. But she’s not lost to him forever. A few years later, now a law student, Michael is one of a handful of students in a special seminar in which the members are observing a trial of female guards who had been stationed in concentration camps.

And you can guess who’s on trial, the fact of which explains a lot about Hanna’s character and behavior.

Reviews of this film starring Ralph Fiennes, Kate Winslet, and David Kross are filled with words like “riveting” and “tour-de-force,” and phrases like “Oscar material,” ending with multiple punctuation marks.

But more interesting than the performances of Fiennes, Winslet, or Kross, and even more interesting than the outcome of the trial and the film’s denouement (both of which are painfully predictable), is the development and presentation of a minor character, a woman who was a child in the concentration camps and who testifies against Hanna in the trial.

At the end of the film, Michael goes to visit the woman as a gesture of–who knows?–obligation? absolution? an effort to arrive at understanding?–and finds that she is living in sprawling Upper East Side opulence.

And, quite frankly, that she’s a cool, hardened, pragmatic woman who cuts through pleasantries and is unwilling to make Michael’s visit an easy one.

He has never confessed his truths to anyone, so it’s strange, perhaps, that he’d choose her, particularly as she lacks, as she says, both the interest and the will to listen to them and provide him the catharsis he’s seeking.

She’s one character type among many representing victimization and survival: unforgiving, still angry after all these years, yet, in a sense, moving on–indeed, moved on–determinedly crafting the kind of life that others were equally determined to prevent her from building and enjoying.

What’s really “riveting” about this movie, then, is not the all-star actors in the roles that are likely to win awards. It’s this woman we’d like to be forgiving and sympathetic (empathic, at least) after all these years, and who steadfastly refuses to be that person. She makes us sit with uncomfortable truths, with endings and relationships that aren’t neat or conclusive. And she does it so well–much more convincing in her role than Winslet, actually–that we leave the theatre a little disturbed. Could we forgive? Are we forgiving? Are transformation and resolution possible?

What? You want me to answer those questions?

Reader photo: grewlike (Flickr creative commons)