George McCartney’s review of the movie The Reader begins with a description of a comedy sketch in which Kate Winslet said that making a movie about the Holocaust is a sure way to win an Oscar.  That part starts at 3:13 in the clip below.

McCartney argues that the movie misses the moral point of Bernhard Schlink’s novel.  Movie and novel both dramatize a sexual relationship in the late 1950s between Hanna, a former Nazi concentration camp guard, and Michael, at the time a 15 year old boy.  The two see each other again years later, when Hanna and other war criminals are on trial and Michael is a law student observing the process.  For McCartney, the key scene in the novel comes at this trial:

In the novel, Schlink’s point is that Hanna is being personally scapegoated for crimes that many others participated in, whether actively or passively.  To prosecute her without admitting this is to perpetuate the nation’s guilt and ramify its bitter consequences.  The novel fully dramatizes the wholly unwarranted self-righteousness of the other young German law students as they observe the trial.  They take it as an occasion to despise the older generation, including their parents, for their complicity in the policies of the Third Reich.  Michael would undoubtedly be with them but for his relationship with Hanna.  As it is, he’s left with the impossible burden of coming to terms with her culpability in the midst of his lingering feelings for her. 

Questioned at this trial about mass murders in which she participated, Hanna asks the judge in a state of true bewilderment, “What would you have done?” 

Of course, with the moral clarity available after events, it’s all too obvious what she should have done.  Schlink’s larger point is that it’s also obvious what the Germans should have done about their Nazi rulers.  But as Hitler rose to power and the Nazis took command of state institutions, barraging the populace with ceaseless propoaganda complemented by a relentless program of civilian surveillance, what course was safely open to the ordinary individual?  It’s easy, Schlink implies, for those who enjoy freedom today to say their elders should have resisted.  Of course they should have.  So should the Russians have resisted the rise of the Bolsheviks and Stalin’s police state.  So should all Americans have denounced George W. Bush’s criminal policies.  Schlink argues that these should haves are only helpful in the present if applied by those who realize that they themselves may not have had the moral heroism necessary to stand up to those in power.   

The novel “does a fair job of examining” the “deformation of a soul” like Hanna’s, a deformation which made it possible for her to commit acts of immense violence while seeing herself only as a victim.  The movie, by contrast, dwells on the actors’ physical nakedness, offering little insight into the psychological terrain in which the characters made their decisions.   “We need to see more than the actors’ breasts, buttocks, and genitalia to understand them.  We need principally to understand what happened to Hanna to make her the way she is.  On screen, we never do.” 

McCartney also objects to the fact that the sex scenes are played out between an 18 year old man playing a 15 year old boy and a 33 year old woman.  “In a film that means to expose the ongoing effects of abuse, we’re edified by the spectacle of a boy actually being abused by his director and his costar.  What else can we call what happens to David Kross in this movie?… [I]s 18 the age whhen, for professional reasons, a boy can disregard the sexual appeal of a nude 33 year old actress pressing against his naked body?  Who’s kidding whom?” 

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