I watched The Reader in an empty multiplex hall, its cavernous yawn beckoning me in. And the desolate aisles seemed to be whispering questions at me, asking me where the rest of the populace was. I could have told them - the next hall was playing Aloo Chaat. The allure of empty entertainment was irresistible.
The Reader, on the other hand, held no such pretensions of aiming to entertain. A staunchly intellectual film, it was pale and sombre and brooding, and even the eroticism of a naked Kate Winslet indulging in the throes of passion couldn't lighten it up.
David Kross played the young boy, Michael, in the film, who falls in love with the much older Hanna Schmitz, and embarks on a brief but torrid love affair, only to find her a decade later on trial for mass murder, for being a concentration camp guard and an allegedly willing participant in Nazi horror. And Kate Winslet took on the task of humanizing the 'monster', of making Hanna's distasteful crimes appear rational.
The movie's subject was the Holocaust, but the angle from which it chose to approach the catastrophe was unusual. It placed not the victim, but the perpetrator at the story's center. It showed us the human side to the monster, then it held up the possibility that monstrous actions are not a function of something called Evil, but something messier, stranger and more common to all. This is chilling stuff, and after watching The Reader, the idea that you could as easily have been in Hanna's place and done what she had done clings to you like a bad dream.
Hanna is a complex character, and the film's triumph lies in how difficult it makes for us to judge her, to believe her to be truly evil, despite the horrific crimes we know her to have perpetrated. She is carnal in her sexual pursuits, yet childlike in her simple enchantment with the stories read out to her. She is cold and emotionally distant in her behaviour towards Michael, yet passionately moved to tears as she sits mesmerized in a church while a young choir sings. She is capable of inhuman acts of cruelty towards the Jews, yet we meet her as the caring, compassionate woman who performed a simple act of kindness for a sick boy by helping him up and escorting him home. Even while she is in the courtroom confessing her crimes, we are charmed by her guilelessness and naive candour, and simultaneously repulsed by her casual indifference to the burning alive of 300 Jewish prisoners. 'The dead are still dead', she says, by way of explanation.
I've decided it is a merit of the film that it does not show Hanna to be remorseful and wanting to change. Instead, Hanna is less ashamed of having killed hundreds of people than of her illiteracy. It would have been easy to show her horrified by a realization of her crimes, or humiliated and truly repentant. But no, the director doesn't make it so convenient for us to make excuses for Hanna, or look for ways to believe she’s a good person. He makes her indifferent to her crimes, and then dares us to pass judgement on her. It's almost as if he's asking us - now that you see her side of it without any extenuating circumstances, is she still a demon? Is she beyond forgiveness?
Ron Rosenbaum, in an article for Slate magazine, criticized the film for what, he alleged, was a sympathetic stance on its part towards the German people like Hanna who were involved in Nazi exterminations. He attacked the film for 'misrepresenting history' and for trying to excuse the heinous crimes that the German people were complicit in by expressing sympathy towards them.
But I don't agree with Rosenbaum. For all that it says on Hanna's behalf, to the film’s credit, she is never really let off the hook. Which is why Michael does not admit his relationship with her in court. And also why he coldly rejects her appeal for acceptance years later, when she is released from prison and he is all that she has. The movie is not really justifying Hanna's actions, just showing us her point of view and giving us a somewhat more balanced perception of the Holocaust.
Ultimately this movie, and all such movies that try to unravel the psyche of the victimiser as opposed to the victimised, fulfill an important requirement for a society that is trying to come to terms with the aftermath of a tragedy - that of demystifying the Enemy. It may be tempting for us to demonise the people who commit such brutalities, or to call it 'collective insanity' and assign them a place in the loony bin of history's annals, but there is one great danger in that. A society that declares a man like Hitler insane, or that believes that an entire nation of people suddenly got swept up in some sort of fever, is a society in denial. Because this 'fever' grows slowly, out of the social and political conditions of the times, out of job shortages and national humiliation, until it explodes into a violent mess of death and destruction. Until you see that Hanna Schmitz let all those people burn to death because her superiors prized ruthless efficiency over common humanity, and because her society did not value the lives of the Jews, you can never understand how she came to believe that killing Jews was just her job, the people were just her “responsibility”. Until you understand that she took that job in the prison because the economic situations of the time did not allow her to pass it up, you will fail to realize that a situation like this could happen again in our society, and we would be powerless to stop it. After all, if you were in her place, are you so sure that you would not do what she did?
And in the end, this is what the movie comes down to - a warning. The point of all the questions the movie asks - in fact the point of all literature that questions past events - is the same, to teach us right from wrong by using others' stories as warnings. The Reader is a warning to every person in our society to not make the mistake that Hanna Schmitz made. Every time we are in a position to choose, The Reader tells us to make the ethical choice, to have the moral courage to stand up for humanity instead of following orders.
But would that not make all wars redundant? Think about it.
References:
McCarthy, Todd. The Reader. Variety. (November 30, 2008)
Goldstein, Patrick. No Oscar glory for 'The Reader'? Los Angeles Times. (December 3, 2008).
Rosenbaum, Ron. Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader. Slate. (February 9, 2009).
Honeycutt, Kirk. Film Review: The Reader. The Hollywood Reporter. (November 30, 2008).
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