The recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all

The Reader

Crit

Well, something has to be the least-deserving Best Picture nomination, doesn't it? And this certainly isn't as intellectually and emotionally dishonest as the winner three years ago. But lemme ask you: if you're two dead producers and you're putting together a crack team including the playwright David Hare to write the screenplay, The Hours' Stephen Daldry to direct, Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes in two of the leading roles, and Lena Olin in two other roles, wouldn't you demand that there not be glaring stupidities, like makeup that looks Winslet look like nothing so much as the best-looking girl in her class amateurishly rendered "old and frumpy" for her high school play? Or like the kid reading to his older paramour in 1958 from Robert Fagles's translation of the Odyssey, which, wonderful though it is, was published in 1996? (Of course, there's the whole issue of the English-language film portraying Germans speaking in English and reading only English-language books [we even see Fagles's first page], but it's a little late in the cinematic game to have a beef with that convention.)

After scathing reviews in the Times and the New Yorker, I wasn't going to bother, even downtown, even with the Kate-naked factor, until two friends recommended it, and then too, the Oscar nom. Well, I don't think it merits scathing reviews, certainly: it's a faithful adaptation of an overrated novel whose two key surprises are manifestly unsurprising, and unlike Dargis and Lane, I don't automatically reject the notion that we might profitably observe the efforts of a willing Holocaust participant to maintain the protective shell surrounding a fragile, damaged psyche, or the efforts of someone who loved that former SS guard, unknowing, to come to grips with that love and its attendant guilt and horror. It's just that, as with the book, I was never compelled by or convinced by--and thus never much interested in--those efforts.

You gotta say this, though: Fiennes and Bruno Ganz are evolving nicely in the Holocaust cladistics chart: from a psychopathic death camp commandant and the Big H himself, respectively, to liberal German law academics.