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Become Literate with The Reader

posted by Landon Cassman at 12:55 pm.

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What up y’all? So it’s the 7 day countdown til the Academy Awards…yay! I guess that’s exciting. Well since a lot of your haven’t seen many of the movies that are up for nominations, I want to look inside some of the better ones that you should get around to seeing some time. Today, I thought I’d let you know about one of the movies this year starrring Kate Winslet, The Reader.

There are a couple of interesting things about Kate Winslet being nominated for her acting role in this film in particular. At the Golden Globes, she was remembered as giving an emotional acceptance speech not for this film, but for her other Revolutionary Road, aka her ten year reunion with Leo. Another funny thing about this film, in which she plays a former guard of concentration camps and who has an affair with a 15-year-old later in her life, is that in an episode of Ricky Gervais’ HBO series Extras, a very foul-mouthed and inappropriate Winslet remarks on that fact that the only way she’ll ever win an Oscar is if she does a film about the Holocaust. Well, despite purposely acting as an “unprofessional” actress, she might be right about this win.

As I said before, the story is told from the point of view of Michael Berg, played by Ralph Fiennes, looking back on his love affair with Hannah Schmitz when he was just 15-years-old in Germany, and his memories of reading books to her while she listened attentively. Nearly a decade after this love affair, while he’s in law school, he attends a criminal trial in which women are under charges of having killed many people in a concentration camp. What he finds is that his first love is on trial as being the head of the guards and the focus of much scrutiny from both the judges and the onlookers in the courtroom. Berg feels a deep emotional connection with Schmitz and wants so much for his love to not be guilty. He deals with the demons of how much he cares for her but also what actions she is being accused of as a member of the Nazi Party. After the trial, Berg disregards what she has done in the past, and continues to care about her throughout their time growing older.

Having this been Valentine’s Day weekend, it brings the question about: Can you love someone that has done bad things in their past? This answer should be either very easy or hard to answer. But it asks what kinds of bad things have they done? Have they exterminated a whole race of people? If so, it might be hard to care for them as much as you used to. This dilemma in which Berg must deal with nags him for the majority of his life. He has conflicting emotions about this woman that changed his life from such a young age, and has since made him the man that he had become. As in the song by Peter, Bjorn and John “Young Folks” the singer asks, “If you knew my story word for word, had all my history, would you go along with someone like me?” Is the past really important, or is it the character of someone in the present that matters the most? It is a hard question to answer, but Berg comes to his conclusion in his adulthood.

Both Fiennes and Winslet give truly great performances and bring to the story realism, by addressing complex human emotions for one another, and a more human look at the conflicts that arise within an individual. The film is a must-see if you want to see an original story. It is now playing at Boardman’s Art Theatre.

Landon Cassman: Through boredom and pure enjoyment I find myself always involved in either film or music related endeavors. This is one of them.