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The Reader

The Reader is the story of Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz. Beginning in post-WWII Germany, Michael falls ill and is helped by Hanna. This leads the two to begin a passionate love affair over the summer, involving both sex as well as Michael reading Hanna stories, as she loves being read to. At the end of the summer, 36-year-old Hanna mysteriously disappears, leaving 15-year-old Michael confused and heartbroken. Michael never speaks to anyone of his relationship with Hanna, and it is not until he is a law student observing the war crimes trial of five Nazi prison guards, one of which is Hanna, that he sees her again. As Michael observes the trial, he realizes that Hanna is guarding a secret, and that she is willing to risk everything rather than reveal what she is hiding.

I knew little about the plot in The Reader prior to seeing it, but I knew that Kate Winslet was spectacular in it (she didn’t win that Oscar for nothing!). I knew that Hanna, Kate’s character, was a Nazi prison guard on trial for war crims, but I knew little else about the story. It was with an open mind that I went to see The Reader, and I came away liking the film (although not as much as I expected to) as well as having plenty of things to think about.

The rest of this post is my opinion about the movie and contains spoilers.

It took me a while to figure out that Hanna was illiterate before it became apparent in the movie, but as soon as I saw the scene where she and Michael go to the countryside for lunch and she looked at the menu confusingly, I knew that she was illiterate. It’s incredibly sad to me that she was so ashamed of being illiterate, and that she went to such far lengths to hide this – she went to prison for twenty years for a war crime which she was not the sole perpetrator! I could be missing something, but I don’t really understand why she went to such lengths to hide this truth from everyone.

I do not know if I would have come forward with the knowledge of Hanna’s illiteracy, had I been in Michael’s position during the trial. As much as I would like to think that justice and the concept of right and wrong are solely black and white, there are thousands of shades of gray in between, and in a situation like that, I don’t know what I would have done. I just hope that I never, ever have to be in a position where I have to make any of the choices Michael or Hanna had to make in The Reader.

Overall, it was a good movie. I’m not sure if I was a huge fan of it personally, because I think I didn’t catch a few crucial plot elements¹ so I don’t understand everything I saw in The Reader. However, the performances were spectacular, and Kate really deserved her Oscar for her role as Hanna Schmitz!

Overall Rating: 8/10

1. There’s been some stuff going on in real life that I was preoccupied with when I saw The Reader, so my mind often wandered as the movie was playing. [↩]