Reader's Digest

This weekend, I went to see The Reader. It has been the focus of some award buzz, more than ever after the win of Kate Winslet for Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes.

That right there is the first lie about her performance in this film -- it is most certainly not a "supporting" role. She's the female lead. In fact, the male character around whom the story revolves is actually played by two different actors throughout the course of the film, while Kate Winslet plays her character in all time periods through the use of makeup. No, her agents (or someone) cooked up the idea of entering her for "supporting actress" in this movie and "lead actress" in Revolutionary Road just to double down on her chances.

The second lie is that she didn't truly deserve to win an award for this role. Make no mistake, she is good. Very good. It might even be unfair to hold any marks against her for the simple reason that we've seen her be better in other films. But that's the truth -- she has been better in other movies, and the Hollywood Foreign Press was just doing what (sadly) so many award-giving organizations do: try to make up for overlooking a deserving recipient in the past by awarding their lesser work in the present.

Of course, in doing so, they just perpetuate a cycle in which today's deserving work is postponed its award due until the future. (And that's exactly what happened here. Viola Davis' work in Doubt was better; for that matter, so was Amy Adams'.) Yes, Kate Winslet was good in this movie. But not the best.

Part of the problem, in my view, is that the material wasn't doing her any favors. It's a weak script with extremely slow pacing, and built around a main character whose motives don't quite seem to make sense.

The film begins in Germany, a decade after the Holocaust, and tells of a love affair between a teenage student and an older woman. Years later, after the affair has long ended and the boy has moved on to attend law school, he happens upon his old flame when she stands trial. It turns out that she worked for the SS during the war, and is being brought up on war crimes for which, for reasons perhaps best not spoiled in this review, she chooses not to defend herself. The young man could come forward with the information that she herself will not provide, but chooses not to. And driven by guilt, he begins to send her audio tapes in prison of himself reading various books to her, as he used to do in their short time together.

From the summary I gave, the young man's motives in this business would seem pretty clear -- that he's paralyzed with uncertainty about what is the right thing to do for this woman, when she does not seem to want to save herself. But it gets murkier as the film works toward its conclusion. I've likely already given away too much for anyone who wants to see the movie, but suffice it to say that by the end of it, my friends and I were all left perplexed as to why a man willing to go "this far" would not be willing to go "farther" -- or withdraw from the matter entirely. He adopts a decided "half measure" of action that the script never really manages to explain convincingly. Sometimes a bit of mystery like this can deepen the appeal of a movie, but we did not feel this was such a case.

In the end, I couldn't help but feel that the joke Ricky Gervais made at the Globes was all too apt: "I told you, make a Holocaust picture," and the awards will come. I had to wonder how many voters of the Globes had actually seen the film, as opposed to those who simply heard that the topic was "weighty" and assumed Kate Winslet was due. Make no mistake -- most of what was good about the movie was what she brought to it. But that wasn't enough for me to recommend the film. I give The Reader a C-.