(He's so bummed that he can't even rouse himself to emulate the other cast members' German accents.) Michael is apparently meant to be the last of Hanna's victims, the postwar equivalent of the doomed children who read to her while behind barbed wire. Long divorced and distant from his grown-up daughter, the morose lawyer is supposedly scarred by his underage fling with a woman twice his age. But all he can bring himself to do is become her reader again, reciting books onto cassette tapes that he sends to her in prison. For many years, Michael is haunted by Hanna, who remains his great love. He wants to help Hanna, yet is repulsed by what she did. Personifying postwar Germany, Michael is conflicted. The defendants are former death-camp guards, and one of them is Hanna. Now a law student, Michael joins his professor (a sly Bruno Ganz) and classmates as observers at a trial. One of them, which can be intuited simply from the place and period, is confirmed eight years later. Despite their intense bond, Michael is left. Hanna has two secrets, neither of which is hard to guess. In fifties Germany, a tram conductor embarks on an intellectual and erotic affair with a 15 year-old schoolboy. Michael tells Hanna he loves her, and she sometimes hints that she shares his feelings. go on" - are among the schoolboy's selections. Chekhov, Twain, Tintin and Lady Chatterley's Lover - "This is disgusting. The two meet regularly for sex thereafter, and after the first few trysts, Hanna demands a singular form of foreplay: Michael must read to her. Soon, Hanna's bathing him, and when he steps from the tub, he discovers that she too is naked. After a long recuperation, Michael returns to thank his benefactor. He's helped by Hanna (stalwart Kate Winslet), a tram conductor who generally keeps to herself. One day in 1958, teenage Michael is overcome by illness on his way home from school. Rather than evoking memory's knotted tapestry, the relentless flashbacks and flash-forwards seem merely mechanical. Like the earlier The Hours, also from director Stephen Daldry, The Reader leaps about in time - which doesn't boost its momentum. But he first became that sort of reader almost 40 years earlier, when he was 15 (and played by David Kross). That person is Michael, introduced as a melancholy lawyer (Ralph Fiennes) in mid-'90s Berlin. The movie is in English, of course, which immediately puts some viewers at a disadvantage: They can't know that the German title, Der Vorleser, refers only to someone who reads out loud. Thus begin the problems of The Reader, a British movie of a well-reviewed German novel about issues both moral and bookish. Ralph Fiennes plays an older, more subdued Michael Berg.Īdapting a literary novel to film is always tricky, and it's all the more so when language itself is among the book's subjects. The Reader (2008) Full Movie Click: Movie Storyline: Post-WWII Germany: Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, law student Michael Berg re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.
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