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December 13, 2008
Review: The Reader
The way in which David Hare's screenplay of The Reader is structured, jumping back and forth between the older Michael in the 1990s (played by Ralph Fiennes), the teenage Michael in the midst of his relationship with Hanna, and the slightly older law-student Michael at the trial, tends to make the story somewhat hard to follow. Underlying all the business of the long-term impact of inappropriate sexual affairs, though, The Reader is really a story about German guilt and shame over the horror that was the Holocaust, refracted through the lens of a story about of a young man who fell in love with a woman he later finds out was something of a monster. This theme is further evoked symbolically through Hanna's other secret -- illiteracy -- the shame of which drives her to conceal her inability to read, even though that fact would have cleared her of the more serious of the charges against her as a guard who sent countless Jewish women and children to their deaths.
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Posted by kvoynar at December 13, 2008 02:05 PM
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