Is there really no thread for this film? I’m still trying to figure out my reaction, and it is all but impossible to write about without spoilers, so I hope others have seen it. I assume we all know the story: 15 year-old Michael (David Kross) begins a relationship with 36 year-old Hannah (Kate Winslet) in 1958. She disappears and he sees her again when he is in law school and she is on trial for being a guard at a concentration camp. Hannah is convicted. The adult Michael is played by Ralph Fiennes, and he struggles with his memories of his time with Hannah, and reconnects with her as she serves her jail sentence. The title comes from the fact that Hannah asks the young Michael to read literature to her. It subsequently becomes clear that she had also asked girls in the camp to read to her. The law student Michael deduces that Hannah must have been illiterate.
Holocaust films are very tricky to navigate (and I was reminded of Winslet’s hysterical bit on Extras about needing to do a holocaust film to get an Oscar). The filmakers can’t be seen to show sympathy for a former SS guard, yet the film has no emotional core if Michael does not love and care for Hannah. Surely illiteracy is no excuse for complicity in mass murder, but it does make Hannah seem more vulnerable. Winslet really is wonderful in the film. She portrays Hannah not quite as having a lack of affect, but as deeply guarded in her emotions, and at times genuinely unaware of the significance of her role in the camp (there is a great scene at trial when she asks the prosecutor, in a bewildered tone: “What would you have done? Let them go? We had to keep order.â€). So the reserve she shows toward Michael and everyone else she comes in contact with cannot be from guilt about her actions. What then? Is Hannah another in a long line of damaged woman in film, or is she just clueless? And how does it change how we react to this person that she was complicit in genocide?
I’ll leave the later part of the film, which requires spoilers, until others chime in. I honestly don’t know how to understand Hannah’s later actions or those of the adult Michael.
I posted a little something here (comment #4), but I was mostly lukewarm when it comes to the film as a whole. That moment during the trial when we learn that Hannah played favorites with little Jewish girls who read aloud to her was particularly chilling for me. There’s something of a serial abuser at the heart of this cold, enigmatic character (very well played by Winslet), but the uplifting, Oprah-worthy moments where we see Hannah teach herself to read in the film’s final moments felt too mushy for my tastes. Fiennes, however, is quite remarkable in the secondary role.
just watched this and feel somewhere between chris and jeff. i’ll repost, though, jeff’s comment (to which he links above) because i love its pithiness:
*** SCHPOILERS ***
there’s something trite and old in this film that is however, i think, rescued by winslet’s amazing performance. i remember finding the book totally irritating, and, after all, who wants to revisits the problem of the evil of those who followed orders during the holocaust? yet, it seems, this is what this script, if not the film, wants to do. but winslet goes way deeper and presents us with a woman whom we judge in turn clueless (chris lays it all out very well), psychopathically cruel, unimaginative to the point of horror, really fucked up, or downright retarded. i thank kate winslet and stephen daldry for refusing to find the truth of hanna’s mind. at the end, when michael sees her in prison, hanna is almost heartbreaking in her innocence, her joy to see him, her guilessless in thinking that they can connect as easily as they used to. she wants to hold hands, for god’s sakes.
why does michael know while hannah doesn’t know? why does michael have a moral compass while hannah doesn’t? the law lessons function as a fulcrum in this dissonance, because the ever-questioning (jewish, i take him to be) professor, too, refuses to answer questions, while students hammer in with heated and passionate reactions.
the whole issue of children and sex, or the exploitation of children altogether, is really interesting, too. hannah uses children in the camps whom she has no problem discarding soon after. in fact, she picks the sick and weak, i.e. the easily discardable. why? she isn’t good, or nice, in even the most obvious ways. she is so horrible that even her fellow guards gang up on her. is she horrible to michael? no, but she isn’t certainly good to him. she takes advantage of him without a moment’s compunction.
i like jeff’s theory that michael is scarred for life by child abuse, but i think he is also scarred by this very early confusion between love, sex, and horror. who can trust love when one’s first lover turns out to be a monster?
every time i see the law being carried out in other countries (and i obviously see this done only in movies), i ask myself what is wrong with us. why can’t we have our own abu ghraib nurenberg? why can’t we have open and civilized trials in which witnesses and perpetrators and judges talk and probe? why can’t we have a penal system that doesn’t brutalize people? i am so tired of this country. if it were a dictatorship or a third world mess i would understand. but it’s a first-world democracy! i am tired of people being put away in horrible conditions for decades for minor crimes, of mandatory sentencings, of inflexibility and uselessly lengthy prison sentences, of the largest prison population on earth. a few days ago a friend of a kid i know, a high schooler, shot and killed a cop. i know this kid will face a very tough trial and a very tough sentencing process. i hope this kid is not black, because, if he is, and if the cop is white, he is as good as lost. but he is as good as lost regardless. why do we put kids in jail like that? why do we try them as adults? why do other countries have brief sentences while we are oh so happy to put people away for ages? i am tired of this country.