The Reader

Big Magilla
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Post by Big Magilla »

NEW YORK, NY – (February 20, 2009) The following is a joint statement from Stephen Daldry, Donna Gigliotti, David Hare and Harvey Weinstein, who condemn the fringe criticism of THE READER:

We are proud of THE READER and everyone who made this film. It is outrageous and insulting that people have called it a “Holocaust denial film.” While entitled to their opinion, these allegations are fueled by ignorance and a misunderstanding of the material, and are based on unsubstantiated arguments.

The greatest films elicit great debate and conversation. Unfortunately, the recent attacks on THE READER have generated debates, not about the substance of the film, but about what people believe to be the intent of the filmmakers. To take a piece of art that was constructed with the hard work of many talented people and turn it into propaganda is plain ignorant. No one is suggesting that THE READER must be beloved by everyone. On the contrary, there is always room for criticism. If one does not like the film that is one matter; but to project one’s personal bias on the filmmaker’s objective is wrong and something we could no longer remain silent about.

THE READER is a film about how a generation of Germans lived in the shadow of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Some detractors of the film have said that it is a piece of Holocaust revisionism; however Holocaust survivors, children of Holocaust survivors and a Nobel Peace Prize winner feel differently.

Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has praised, THE READER as “a film that deals powerfully with Germany’s reconciliation with its past.” He said that “it is not about the Holocaust; it is about what Germany did to itself and its future generations.” He called it “a faithful adaptation of an important book, that is still relevant today as genocide continues to be practiced around the world.”

Abe Foxman, the ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor agrees with Mr. Wiesel. "As we move further away from the Holocaust we must continue to tell the story of the Shoah in ways that will reach and touch new generations. The Reader, which takes place in post-WWII Germany, clearly portrays the horrors of the Holocaust, not visually but intellectually and emotionally. There is no doubt to what Kate Winslet's character, Hannah Schmitz, did during the war. Her guilt is given. At her trial her crimes are portrayed in detail and she is brought to justice for them. The Reader is not meant to be a factual re-telling of the Holocaust; for that we have documentaries. Rather it is about guilt and responsibility that is as important for our times as it was for post-war Germans.”

Unfortunately we live in a world where Holocaust denial still exists. Just a few weeks ago, the Vatican made headlines when the Pope lifted the excommunication of a Catholic Bishop who made statements denying the full extent of the Holocaust. In today’s world, with the recent genocides in Darfur, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia, there are enough signs that bigotry still exists to an alarming degree. Denial and revisionist history of some of the greatest atrocities of our time can only lead to further violence and horrors.

THE READER is a film that has sparked controversy and it is not something we are shying away from. In this day and age we need healthy debate but what some have written is mudslinging at its worst and we think it is time to rise above it.
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Post by Mister Tee »

Penelope wrote:The illiteracy is a symbol for the Germans who stood silently by, complicit with the evil that occurred. By taking the steps to learn to read, it is a symbol of Germany's attempt to come to grips with what occurred. This is more readily apparent in the book than in the film.
More than "readily apparent". As far as I was concerned, this was 100% absent from the film.
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Post by Sabin »

I should hope so, Penelope.

Thanks, Damien.
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Post by Penelope »

The illiteracy is a symbol for the Germans who stood silently by, complicit with the evil that occurred. By taking the steps to learn to read, it is a symbol of Germany's attempt to come to grips with what occurred. This is more readily apparent in the book than in the film.
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Post by Damien »

Great, perspicacious post, Josh.

The more I think about this movie, the more ridiculous AND hateful it becomes.
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Post by Sabin »

I want to follow up on The Reader again.
MINOR SPOILERS...


My writing partner said he heard the tersest assessment of the film upon leaving the theater.

"It's like she was more ashamed of not being able to read than being a Nazi."

Now, I don't want revisionist schmaltz. I'm glad it's Stephen Daldry and not Ron Howard or Norman Jewison because at least then...well...I guess the most I can say is that I get to see some titties. But one of the building blocks of this film is that Hanna Schmidt is ashamed of her illiteracy and potentially takes it out on those around her. The early scenes with Michael are woefully underdeveloped and whatever chamber drama may have existed on the page is NOT on the screen.

When Hanna Schmidt is in court and she is asked to give a handwriting sample, she would prefer to damn herself because of pride than admit to personal failing. That Winslet is not convincing as a woman who cannot read aside, this is ostensibly a Nazi mentality. She must be strong and she is weak. She is a mature woman who cannot read and she would rather spend the rest of her life in jail than admit to this. She is utterly pragmatic about her role in the extermination of the Jews but cannot admit to personal failing. She is a fucking Nazi.

Later, Ralph Fiennes sends her audio recordings of him reading to her. Stephen Daldry links them through awkward cross-cutting (that's the Stephen Daldry Promise!) and slowly he nourishes her thirst for education. She starts to learn to read and is partially redeemed having overcome the obstacle that landed her in prison in the first place.

The major obstacle in The Reader is illiteracy, not culpability in genocide.

This is quite the thermite grenade of a quandary The Reader attempts to tackle. What can you really say about someone more troubled about illiteracy than genocide? What can you say about the man who loves her still? I found myself asking if the film would be any different if she did confess to her illiteracy and I don't believe it would.

That The Reader claims to be operate as meditation on the nature of evil (and with every distant glance toward cipherous Kate Winslet, indeed it is) isn't a disservice to the Holocaust but to meditations on the nature of evil.




Edited By Sabin on 1234908798
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Post by Sonic Youth »

The problem with The Reader (well, one of many - its Cinematography nod gets my vote for the most undeserved this year; never has an overhead shot of a man floating in a lake looked so ordinary and unpoetic) is that the Holocaust is depicted to the audience as oral history. We see the witnesses to the horror but never the ultimate victims of it. There isn't a single flashback. Artistically, this is a very respectable* decision, but it also rigs the game by not giving the impression that Hannah is less benevolent than she comes off (especially in comparison with her co-defendants who, in a particularly ham-fisted sequence, look like unsophisticated hoi polloi for daring to pit all the blame on her).


*and that's another problem with the film overall; it's the sort of generically mature, adult, respectable drama that makes people flee to the nearest Clint Eastwood screening when they see those descriptive adjectives in the reviews.




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Post by Sabin »

The Reader interprets the Holocaust as a wet dream that a grown man can never wake up from. The only issue I have with this is that it’s not an especially profound wet dream, it doesn’t deepen as it goes along and there’s nothing lingering from dream for our protagonist to decipher later on. Film has been used as such a fascinating exploration on the nature of memory that when something as surface as The Reader comes along, it sadly almost feels like escapism. And it is there that I find my chief issue with The Reader. For something as allegedly psychologically damaging, The Reader doesn’t seem half bad – even if it is essentially masturbating to soft-core with Shoah in the background.

Stephen Daldry is not the filmmaker to bring you into The Reader. His style of filmmaking is akin to watching check-out lines at the grocery store and pointing towards the shortest line. You will get to the end of that line faster because there are fewer people. It’s that kind of insight that made The Hours such an interminable slog. Although The Reader is far superior to that film (seeing as how thin Billy Elliot was, this is likely his best film), it’s because the way he cross cuts around actually telling a story this time is a simpler feat. It’s harder to Not Tell a story in The Hours than The Reader. There is really no rhyme or reason to any of the Memory Cuts outside of efficiency. Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine points out that memory doesn’t really work the way it is portrayed in The Reader and I agree. Memory is associative. In The Reader, it is convenient to the narrative.

That being said, there are quite simply scores of scenes in The Reader that make no sense in their context and where the dialogue they deliver feels obtuse and strange. There is a scene where Michael reads to Hanna and she weeps openly in his arms. In reading on the page – HANNA CRIES IN MICHAEL’S ARMS AS HE READS TO HER. – there is no thought as to how silly openly braying might appear in lieu of quiet devastation. Often times it’s said that the stigma of the Writer/Director is that a writer will be incapable of bringing fresh interpretation to the set. That is the Stephen Daldry Promise: what you see (on the page) is what you get (on the screen, regardless of stilted pace or performance).

It’s entirely possible that Kate Winslet is the most beloved Actor of our generation. Heath Ledger was our Tragic Virtuoso, but Kate Winslet’s career has an ebb and flow that few can claim, making the most tasteful choices until Titanic superstardom and then back to what she was doing before as we criticized her weight. The tragedy of Winslet’s career is her reliability. Roles like Little Children, Finding Neverland, and Iris are footnotes when held up against something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, something different, new, and Oscar-worthy. Her work in The Reader only looks Oscar-worthy. If what she does in Revolutionary Road feels like cake, then The Reader is something like a rushed meal. There is so much more to this character than Winslet’s naked beauty and elderly makeup, and nobody seems terribly invested in it. In her encounters with Michael, there is zero consistency in her conceptualization. How old is Hanna, literally and figuratively? A movie like Summer of ’42 (RIP Robert Mulligan) brings the viewer into the voyeurism of young love while still paying attention to the seducer. There is a devastating performance in The Reader done disservice by myopia.

Like Marc Forster and Sam Mendes, there is something fundamentally boring to a Stephen Daldry film. Forster and Mendes operate as Journeymen empowered by script or franchise aspirations. Stephen Daldry seems to be defined by his pairing with writer David Hare and it’s a menopausal one at that. There has been no joy of performance since Jamie Bell first busted a movie, nor joy of eroticism, of visual or music composition, or of message. If it’s perhaps premature to tag Stephen Daldry on the basis of his two collaborations with David Hare, Scott Rudin, and the Weinsteins, it certainly seems like he’s going to be making this boring-ass movie again and again for years to come. Just as Michael Bay makes action movies into trailers, Stephen Daldry makes trailers for Oscars.




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Post by kaytodd »

I liked The Reader more than I thought I would but I agree it should not have been one of the BP, director or screenplay nominees. But I have to disagree with the idea that Streep should win over Kate. I think it was one of the most extraordinary female lead performances I have ever seen. And I am not one of those Kate groupies. I thought she should have won for Eternal Sunshine but I have no problem at all with Hillary's win. I was just amazed at what Kate pulled off in The Reader. Hannah is obviously not a sympathetic character but I felt empathy for her and cared about her. She might not have been as culpable as the people she worked with during the war but she recognized she needed to answer for what happened during the war. She was using Michael for her selfish needs because she is not in a position to have a committed relationship. But she showed vulnerability and I thought the scene when she was in the tub and silently confessed her love to Michael was moving and pitch perfect work by Kate.

And apparently she did it pretty much on her own. I doubt it was Daldry's magic for I agree that the other key character, Michael, was not well drawn out at all in either his young or older form.




Edited By kaytodd on 1234801065
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Post by HarryGoldfarb »

Mister Tee wrote:the near-final scene with Lena Olin has more heft than anything that precedes it -- and it struck me that it was the final scene for a movie that covered alot more ground. A movie that dealt with not just Hana's illiteracy, but how that closed off options for her to the degree that a camp guard was all she could aspire to be. A movie where Michael Berg's mixed feelings about her had at least something to do with his wondering how complicit his parents were in the German of Hitler. Maybe even a movie with more insight into the characters of Lena Olin and her mother. I'm obviously talking about a film of far more range, covering wide swaths of German post-war society. The problem for me is, The Reader half-raises some of these issues...but in the end is just an hour of soft-core sex followed by a second-rate issues-discussion.
The best description of the film ever. I was trying to precise my own feelings towards this film and then I read this and it's like someone actually translated my thoughts.

I liked it, I've seen worst best picture nominees but it failed to impress me. It's comes third in Daldry's filmography, I hated that I didn't know a thing about the characters and the time shifting didn't feel organic at all. No subject was really developed, no issue was really brought in, and Fiennes did nothing to kept me interested in the current storyline...

Count me on the gruop that'd hate to see Winslet winning for this. After watching Streep's face at SAG, hearing her acceptance speech and the audience reaction I so do want to like Doubt in order to support a win for her.

Wall-E should be the fifth BP nominee instead of this.
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Post by Bog »

Mister Tee wrote:I think one day people might look back at it the way people now do at Al Pacino's "at last" win -- or, at best, Paul Newman's.
This is completely what deflates me about the finality of it being for this performance...that should be in 20 years (gasp)...however harrowing that wait would be for everyone.

Like Eric said, this would be so much easier and satisfying if she had maybe put it down for Sense and Sensibility and/or Titanic and none of this Reader trash. Then she could humbly rack up 14/15 nominations a la the Streep without another victory or anticipation ever again.
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Post by Mister Tee »

Am I the last to get to this?

If tastefulness were the key to art, Stephen Daldry would be in the pantheon. (Obviously, as far as Academy members are concerned, he's there already) But given how absent such elements as vitality and surprising insight are to his work, I doubt he'll ever get there.

I agree the near-final scene with Lena Olin has more heft than anything that precedes it -- and it struck me that it was the final scene for a movie that covered alot more ground. A movie that dealt with not just Hana's illiteracy, but how that closed off options for her to the degree that a camp guard was all she could aspire to be. A movie where Michael Berg's mixed feelings about her had at least something to do with his wondering how complicit his parents were in the German of Hitler. Maybe even a movie with more insight into the characters of Lena Olin and her mother. I'm obviously talking about a film of far more range, covering wide swaths of German post-war society. The problem for me is, The Reader half-raises some of these issues...but in the end is just an hour of soft-core sex followed by a second-rate issues-discussion. Above all, I don't think Michael Berg is an interesting enough character around which to center all this. He's a largely passive guy who mostly mopes around; I don't care what ecomes of him, and I'm forced to watch nearly 40 years of his life. (40 years dealt with in scattershot fashion, as dws chronicles) Hana's POV alone might have made for a more interesting work.

I agree with Damien about all the characters declaiming. I've liked Bruno Ganz plenty in the past, but his character here is wafer-thin. And that loudmouth in the seminar goes on and on and somehow no one ever tells him to stifle it. I also second Damien's "get over it" to the Fiennes character. You got sensationally laid when you were 15. 8 years later you found out bad things about the lady, and this somehow turns you into a cold fish for life? Some people have real problems.

I was very confused about Winslet's character strictly from a chronological standpoint: they say she was born in 1922, which would have made her a guard at about 21. Was this common? And, if so, she would have tbeen 36 when she had the fling with Michael. Why did they have her made up to look about 50? I spent the first hour of the movie wondering why they'd cast Winslet when they obviously wanted someone ten years older.

Sad to say, I can't be enthused about Winslet winning for this. Like Bog, I easily prefer her Revolutionary Road performance. In fact, having loved that, and Kristen Scott Thomas in I've Loved You So Long, and admired a number of other female performances this year, I can't believe the best actress contest seems to be coming down to two second-tier pieces of work by Streep and Winslet. I'm not saying she's in any way bad; she's pretty much incapable of that. But I didn't find any of her work here more memorable than that of the previous actress Daldry brought to an Oscar. It's the old Oscar special: makeup and accent. I think one day people might look back at it the way people now do at Al Pacino's "at last" win -- or, at best, Paul Newman's.
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Post by Big Magilla »

An interesting point from Roger Ebert:

I was watching Tony Scott on the Charlie Rose program, and he said, in connection with "The Reader," that he was getting tired of so many movies about the Holocaust. I didn't agree or disagree. What I thought was, "The Reader" isn't about the Holocaust. It's about not speaking when you know you should.

That's something I'm guilty of. I hold my tongue all the time, especially in social situations where my opinions might cause unhappiness. Those often involve politics and religion, two subjects that a lot of mothers tell their kids never to discuss at a dinner party--unless, of course, everybody at the table agrees, and then what's the point?
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Post by The Original BJ »

Big Magilla wrote:It's been a punishing awards season for Winslet, but I'm feeling like it's going to pay off in the end.
Oh yeah. Winning trophies at every ceremony possible, and sometimes more than one, just sucks.
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Post by Eric »

Probably the worst piece of writing I've seen all year, and anyone who didn't think that Kate Winslet had the award in the bag the moment she was nominated in lead instead of supporting is out of their league as a professional Oscar prognosticator.



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