/ 27 March 2009

Reading the past

‘Today there are so many books and films that the world of the [concentration] camps is part of our collective imagination and completes our ordinary everyday one. Our imagination knows its way around it, and since the television series Holocaust and movies like Sophie’s Choice and especially Schindler’s List, actually moves in it, not just registering but supplementing and embellishing it.”

So writes Bernhard Schlink in his novel, The Reader, now turned into a movie by scriptwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry. The novel is short and meditative, covering a whole life story, and filled with unanswerable questions that float around the mind of its first-person protagonist and narrator. He is mulling over the meaning of his life in the context of post-war Germany, and that’s the substance of it — which means that turning it into a film was always going to be hard.

The ruminations of Michael Berg, the protagonist, have to be externalised in a movie — so action replaces thought. It also means that much of what is framed as a question (often with the answer “I don’t know”) in the book has to be made more definite in the film. For those reasons, I think the movie considerably weakens the impact of the book and turns the story into something much more ordinary.

There is some voice-over narration to cover a few of the gaps. Ralph Fiennes plays Michael in later life, with a backward-looking point of view trying to add up what it meant to him to have a passionate affair, at about the age of 15, with a woman 20 years older than he was, and then to discover her awful secrets about a decade later.

Unfortunately, this mostly requires Fiennes to act miserable — a job at which he is undeniably very proficient. He produces a thin, mournful half-smile-half-grimace with consummate skill. And produces it and produces it — He certainly does not manage to animate this character. In fairness, it’s not an easy job. Take out the thoughtful self-examination that is the heart of the novel and all we’re left with is someone who can’t deal with his emotions and has a sort of locked-in approach to life and love.

Kate Winslet, as Hanna Schmitz, the woman with whom the youthful Michael has his formative amour, of course won an Oscar for her performance. It is undoubtedly one of great technical finesse, her face carefully clenching and unclenching as required. Her body language is certainly dead right. For my money, though, she’s out-acted by David Kross, who plays the teenaged Michael. To this viewer at least he felt authentic and at ease in his role in a way that made Winslet’s twitchy actorisms feel even more technical.

In any case, when they are on screen together they raise each other’s game and the film truly comes to life. Perhaps inevitably, this passionate affair has more energy than the rest of the movie. Once it’s over and we move on into the later stages (out of the 1950s into the 1960s and beyond), the film becomes increasingly leaden.

It begins to feel less like a life lived and contemplated and more like a dreary lesson in victimhood and guilt — one which, moreover, can’t quite nail down the moral of the story, if there is one. The Reader has that air of deep meaningfulness that serious movies strive for, but what precisely does it mean? (I read the book after seeing the film, and thought: So that’s what it was about.)

The part that excites and touches is the love affair; the long-delayed aftermaths should compel our moral attention, but they do so only in a duty-bound sort of way. Basically, the first half or third of The Reader is compelling. The rest is not.

Michael Berg finally gets a moment of confession and truth, in relation to his own daughter, but it doesn’t really do much to redeem the preceding trudge. Notably, that moment is not in the book, yet other key confrontations have been omitted: Berg and his philosopher father, Berg and a man who gives him a lift on the way to visit Auschwitz.

This removes what is explicitly stated as the book’s central concern: the post-war generation’s attempt to deal with the Holocaust in relation to the older generation, their parents and parents’ coevals, who were active during the war. Bruno Ganz as a law lecturer debating some of these issues with his students is not much of a substitute. I suppose the filmmakers didn’t want to make too talky (or thinky) a film, but then they should have tackled a different book.

Ganz’s presence highlights another anomaly — the accents. He’s German, and his accent is particularly noticeable in a film in which everyone speaks English, as though the film itself had been mysteriously babelfished as we watched. Kross, also German, has less of an accent; Fiennes and Winslet, native English-speakers, have to add a little hint of a German accent to their Rada English. This is all too much like those old war films (or the recent Valkyrie) where the Germans speak English to each other in German accents to show that they are German.

It’s all very distracting, and it removes a layer of realism and credibility from a film that purports to be, at least in part, about truth and lies. It feels as wrong as seeing the English pages and titles of the books Michael reads to Hanna, as though they’d been instantly babelfished too.

By the way, the book’s title in German, Der Vorleser, means more than simply The Reader; it’s clear that it’s about reading aloud and not just quietly to oneself. That transformation is unavoidable if the title of the book is to be turned into English, but it’s also one small hint of what, in the film, has been lost in translation.