The Reader (2008)

Set in Germany, a sexually inexperienced 15 year old student (David Kross) engages in an affair with a 38 year old woman (Kate Winslet in an Oscar winning performance) over the course of a summer in 1958. She disappears without a trace after that summer but that relationship has emotional and psychological effects as he (morphing into Ralph Fiennes) grows into adulthood and is confronted with her Nazi past. Based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink and directed by Stephen Daldry (THE HOURS). A powerful and complex film that seems to split reaction into two halves. Most of the negative reaction stems from those who feel that the movie attempts to gloss over Winslet's character's past as Nazi guard at Auschwitz and her complicity in the death of the Jews she was in charge of and uses her illiteracy as a tool to make her more sympathetic. This is in addition to those who view her as a sexual predator who uses a 15 year old boy. I personally don't feel that way. There can be no justification for her actions as a Nazi prison guard so the film doesn't dwell on it and instead focuses on the character played by Kross and later Fiennes and the traumatic effect the relationship had on them, stunting their emotional growth as it were. We know her relationship with the adolescent boy is ethically and morally wrong, does anybody really need to be lectured that it is? The film assumes we are adults and can reason for ourselves without being hit over the head Stanley Kramer style to point us in the right direction. The score by Nico Muhly is a beauty. With Lena Olin playing both a mother and her daughter (her last scene is superb) and Bruno Ganz.