Tonight the Golden Globe Awards will be on TV, drawing millions of fawning movie fans. The Reader, which I saw with my daughter a few weeks ago, is up for best motion picture in the drama category. This movie demonstrates yet again how supremely easy it is for movies to make audiences weep — even for questionable characters who do very bad things.
The film is based on the German writer Bernhard Schlink’s eponymous 1995 novel about a lawyer, Michael Berg (played as a young man by David Kross and then later, as an adult, by Ralph Fiennes) who, while a teenager living in Germany after the war, has a love affair with Hanna Schmitz, a much older woman (played by Kate Winslet). During the War, when Michael was no more than a toddler, Hanna was a concentration camp guard. After the affair has ended, and several years have passed, Hanna ends up tried for war crimes, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. While watching the trial, Michael figures out that she’s completely illiterate, a secret she’d hidden from him and everyone else. Although revealing this fact to the court might have lessened the severity of her sentence, Michael doesn’t do so. (For a full summary of the plot, see IMDb.com.)
To my daughter (who, unlike me, read the book as well as saw the movie), The Reader moves us by transforming the dry philosophical questions of individual versus collective guilt, or whether and to what extent there are degrees of guilt, into a visceral life-and-death story in which we are all partly guilty and partly blameless. Hanna, the bad concentration camp guard, isn’t fully wicked, and Michael, the good German who came along after the war, isn’t fully good. Unlike my daughter, however, I don’t find the movie helps me focus on these questions. Instead, I can’t get away from thinking about how beautiful movies are, and how their beauty elicits cheap tears from the audience.
Even on the big screen — a merciless playing field for human beauty — Kate Winslet is a beautiful woman. She’s got one of those round and full childlike faces that, when encircled by one of those sweet 50s collars that she wears for most of the movie, makes her look as innocent as a second-grader. She’s also got a gorgeous body that The Reader repeatedly invites the audience to gaze upon. Throughout the movie, Michael and Hanna climb in and out of the bathtub and have lots of sex.
Even near the end of Hanna’s life, when she’s old and has supposedly lost her beauty, Hanna’s face and body still carry Kate Winslet’s beauty. Winslet the beautiful actor comes right through the latex wrinkle mask. In the most telling detail of all — a seemingly insignificant thing that is actually always critical in the movies — Hanna has beautiful teeth. Never mind that she’s a European who’s gone through the Second World War sans toothpaste, brushing, or flossing. Her smile looks like an ad for Crest.
For all the theoretical prattle about the willing suspension of disbelief, the looks of movie stars permeate the characters they play. Hanna Schmitz is at least part Kate Winslet, making it almost inevitable that audiences feel empathy for her.
It’s no accident that beauties and not frumps play the big movie roles. The beauty of Helen of Troy made strong-grieved Achaeans head straight to war. Winslet’s beauty, though perhaps not quite as spectacular as that, is enough to make a modern audience reach for its collective Kleenex. Contrary to common platitudes about what movies do for us on the moral front, they actually help us forget complicated questions about guilt and responsibility.
Perhaps my daughter liked the movie version of The Reader more than I did at least partly because she had read the book. Books, unlike movies, can penetrate the inner, secret workings of a mind. Most of the time, it’s not a pretty picture — which helps explain why so many people prefer movies to books.
