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"The Reader": Bad news--illiteracy caused the Holocaust

Posted by mr grits on January 10, 2009 at 18:15:15

I shouldn't have posted this spoiler but I couldn't resist. It seems Winslett accidentally seduces a 15 year old lad in pre-war Berlin. She likes his youth and builds their relationship on his reading her great classics before they boink around. The affair lasts one summer before she mysteriously disappears and the lad turns into Ralph Fiennes.

The lad starts law school under the tutelage of Bruno Ganz (sans mustache). Ganz decides to expose his class to a trial of six women guards from Auschwitz by having them attend daily. Among the six is Winslett. The lad is devastated as he hears the charges and the testimony day by day. During the trial five of the defendants gang up on Winslett accusing her of ordering 350 Jews be held in a burning church by claiming she wrote the report of the incident which, logically, would mean she was in charge. Winslett, not wanting to reveal her illiteracy, assumes the guilt and gets a life sentence. One would say "how stupid" but you have to see the character Winslett portrayed to understand that point.

Lena Olin plays a Auschwitz survivor Fiennes visits in the end to settle up old accounts. Olin's character had written an account of her Auschwitz imprisonment which had brought the six women to justice in 1966. We see her as a younger woman and then, finally, as an unforgiving and hardened woman. Major irony is drawn when Fiennes enters her luxurious NYC apartment and he remembers the near squalor Winslett lived in before the war as well as the German prison.

This is not a must see. Well filmed with a good eye for cinematography it rambles a bit to the "long side" of the clock. If you are interested in the the era and "how did this happen" you might find it expository but no more enlightening than your present thoughts.

Oh yes, Winslett needs to keep her child-bearing breasts to herself.

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