The Movie Vampire

The Holocaust was an almost unthinkable tragedy that was unparalleled by any event that occurred during the twentieth century.  It’s understandable why an event of such magnitude would invite film adaptation, there’s a lot of drama to it and it’s generally an important part of history which deserves to be discussed and remembered.  However, I’ve found a lot of the films made about it have had serious problems.  Sophie’s Choice was strong whenever it focused on the event, but the film as a whole was torpedoed by a horrible framing story that dominates most of its running time.  Schindler’s List, while strong at certain points, generally lacked focus and despite its colossal runtime it failed to develop any of its characters except for Schindler.  The strongest movie about the Holocaust was probably Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, which wisely maintained its focus on the title character and did not distract itself with material that was ancillary to that story.  All of these projects were at least respectable, but there have been plenty of less than reputable movies on the subject like Life is Beautiful, Jakob the Liar, and the like.  That’s why I get queasy whenever  one of these projects comes along, whenever a filmmaker is dealing with a subject as powerful as the Holocaust the potential is open for distraction and manipulation.  That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to find that Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, while hardly a perfect drama, was not really about the Holocaust and it did not unnecessarily dwell on human suffering. 

It starts in 1995 and focuses on a German lawyer named Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes). Quickly, the film flashes back to 1958, when Michael (now being played by David Kross, not to be confused with comedian David Cross), is fifteen and living in Neustadt.  On a rainy day, Michael finds himself getting very ill and throwing up on the doorstep of a random apartment building.  A tram conductor in her thirties named Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) notices this sick adolescent and helps him home.  Once he recovers, Michael returns to her building to thank her for her kind turn.  The next thing he knows, Hanna’s standing behind him naked, banging commences.  The two have an affair for about a year or so, and during their nightly screw-sessions she asks Michael to read some of his books to her.  Eventually she comes to her senses, cuts the humping off and moves out of town without leaving a forwarding address.  Michael eventually goes to Law School and it would seem that he will finally move on with his life, but soon he’ll run into Hanna again and learn a dark secret about her past.

I’ll admit that that plot description is rather glib, but when a movie takes itself this seriously you really can’t help but talk about it like that.  This is very much a story that would only come from a novel, that is to say a novel with a capital “N,” the kind that focuses on characters and symbolism rather than plot.  In this case it was a 1995 German language novel by Bernhard Schlink that Oprah apparently liked a lot.  Much like play adaptations, movies based on these kind of novels tend to have a very distinctive and slightly lifeless feel to them.  Producer Anthony Minghella’s 1996 Oscar winning film The English Patient had a similar novelish tone to it, though this project never reaches that level of literary stuffiness. 

The film’s reputation and advertising will have you thinking about it as a holocaust movie starring Ralph Fiennes, but there are no scenes set before 1958 and David Kross has a lot more screen time than Mr. Fiennes.  Anyone ready to guess what Hanna Schmitz’ dark secret is yet?  The movie is probably better if you don’t know, but everyone else in the world has given it away by now so I won’t dance around it any further.  The chick was a former Nazi who worked as a guard in a concentration camp.  A good hour of the film is dedicated to the affair between the title character and the former-nazi twice his age, and the second half depicts the effects that this dark secret has on his life.  In other words, the kid humps a Nazi for a year and then spends forty years moping about it.  At a certain point I was about ready to shout “you bagged a Nazi, get over it!” at the screen, but my sense of theater etiquette prevented such an outburst.

The acting is really what saves this film, and without really talented performers this wouldn’t have even begun to work.  Kate Winslet is clearly the standout; her role is very demanding and if she had overplayed it the film probably would have bordered on unwatchable.  In the early portions she needs to show that she has a haunted past and cold demeanor while simultaneously seeming normal enough for Michael to fall in love with.  Winslet easily could have tried to play for more sympathy, and if she had the whole movie would have fallen apart.  David Kross is also a nice discovery, he hadn’t been in anything I’d heard of before this, but he certainly brought what was needed to his character here.  Like I said before, Ralph Fiennes isn’t really in this all that much, but he is pretty good when he is on screen.

Does the film really deserve the massive amount of sarcasm I’ve directed toward it?  Probably not, but something about this movie just encourage that kind of response, it takes itself really, really, seriously, but it’s literary source give it a certain artificiality that makes it hard to really love it as it wants to be loved.  All the film’s symbolism and psychology probably works a lot better on the page where it can be pondered with a certain detachment, but when you’re watching it on the screen it just seems kind of fake and pretentious.  But the film’s problems can’t all be blamed on the potential inadaptability of its source material, I think last year’s Atonement succeeded marvelously where this failed, in fact The Reader kind of reminds me of how good that movie was.  Most people were pretty shocked to see this nominated for Best Picture, and many fans of The Dark Knight and The Wrestler have jumped on this film for stealing their slot.  I share their anger, but most of the wrath should probably be saved for Frost/Nixon, which was a lot more manipulative and didn’t have this film’s control of tone.  I’ll probably never be able to really enjoy it, but it’s mostly put together well, and as far as deathly serious dramas go you can do a lot worse.  Recommended, but mainly for the acting.

*** out of Four