We are living in a time of change, when history is being made right before our eyes: America is led by a president who is not a white male, a financial crisis looms over most of the world, and one of the worst Holocaust movies in the history of cinema has won a slew of awards and an Oscar. Yes, I am talking about "The Reader" (2008).
At the very heart of "The Reader" there is a spark of provocative genius that deserves critical acclaim and recognition from the Academy. That facet of the film, however, is not what won the Oscar. The brilliant screenplay that dealt with the complicated subject of forgiving the unforgivable in the context of (and as a response to) post-modernist thinkers like Jacques Derrida, did not even receive a nomination.
No, instead it was the most debilitating flaw of the film that received the most praise. Kate Winslet's allegedly stellar performance is simply nonexistent -- not simply because it lacked a "stellar" quality, but because there was no "performance" in the first place. Rather, Winslet spent a third of the film baring her breasts, and apparently that's enough to win the Oscar for Best Actress nowadays. This is not to speak ill of Kate Winslet's breasts, but if that qualifies as great acting, I'd hate to see what would happen if the Academy ever discovered the cultural phenomenon known as pornography.
I will give Winslet credit for one thing though: she tried. She tried her hardest to act and you could see that. Though every nuance of her expression was as emotionally hollow as that of a first-year film school student, she clearly followed Stephen Daldry's direction to a tee. If anything, the director deserves the award for effort (if that's what won Winslet the Oscar in the first place), just for the amount of time that was seemingly invested into guiding her every gesture and glance in the film.
The saddest thing about this whole mess of a film is that it may have actually worked, had there been a talented actress to play the lead role. Replace Winslet with Charlize Theron, who starred in the Academy Award-winning "Monster" (2003), and the film might have been salvaged.
But even an excellent cast would not have been able to conceal the film's other flaws.
The plot, in a nutshell, details an affair between Michael Berg, a young German boy (David Kross), and Hanna (Winslet), an older woman, in post-WWII Germany. Hanna harbors a dark secret that comes back to haunt Berg many years later (and this so-called twist can be intuited from a mile away).
Aside from sex, their relationship consists of Berg reading books to Hanna. By the end of the first hour, the subtle clues have added up such that it's blatantly obvious that she's illiterate. And yet, when this fact becomes relevant, we still have a series of flashbacks to remind us of that fact.
The dialogue proves to be the biggest offender in terms of triteness, and ends up drowning the film in cliches. It's as if a dozen bargain-bin romance novels were chucked into a blender and poured into the script. The resulting eye-rolling is enough to give your extraocular muscles a good workout.
Add to that the grueling pace and you have an utter failure of a film. By the 90-minute mark I was begging for the film to end, but it plodded along far into the future, showing Winslet made up to look old and wrinkled.
To be fair, this was one of the few places where Winslet managed to pass off some decent acting. But by this point, the film's slow pacing had almost lulled me sleep, so I may have actually fallen asleep and just dreamed that the admittedly attractive Winslet was a good actress.
Had "The Reader" been a run-of-the-mill film completely disassociated from the Holocaust (and that is not completely unfeasible), I may not have been so hard on it. But because the Holocaust is in itself a harrowing and emotional topic, such a careless and sloppy treatment of the subject matter is downright insulting.
Given that Jerry Lewis won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars this year, he should have just gone ahead and released his infamous unreleased work "The Day the Clown Cried" (1972) -- a Holocaust film so atrocious and inappropriate that the select few insiders who saw it dubbed it the worst movie ever made.
Maybe that would have made "The Reader" seem better in comparison.
