The Reader

The Reader is an Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA, Golden Globe Award-winning 2008 British drama film based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink. The film adaptation was written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry. Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet star along with the young actor David Kross. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, who both died before it was released. Production began in Germany in September 2007, and the film opened in limited release on 10 December 2008.

It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a teenager in the late 1950s had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past, a secret that may cost her at the trial.

Winslet and David Kross, who plays the young Michael, have received much praise for their performances. The film has been nominated for several major awards.

Plot
The Reader begins in 1995 Berlin, where Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is preparing breakfast for a woman who has spent the night with him. After she leaves, Michael watches a U-Bahn pass by, flashing back to a tram in 1958 Neustadt. A teenage Michael (David Kross) gets off because he is feeling sick and wanders around the streets afterwards, finally pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he vomits. Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), the tram conductor, comes in and assists him in returning home.


Michael (Kross) reads to Hanna (Winslet) after sex.Michael, diagnosed with scarlet fever, must rest at home for the next three months. After he recovers he visits Hanna. The two begin an affair. During their liaisons, at her apartment, he reads to her literary works he is studying, such as The Odyssey, The Lady with the Little Dog and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After a bicycling trip, Hanna learns she is being promoted to a clerical job at the tram company. She abruptly moves without leaving a trace.

After seeing the adult Michael, a lawyer, we see him at Heidelberg University law school in 1966. As part of a special seminar taught by Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz), a camp survivor, he observes a trial of several women who were accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the death march following the 1944 evacuation of Auschwitz. Hanna is one of the defendants.

Stunned, Michael visits a former camp himself. The trial divides the seminar, with one student angrily saying there is nothing to be learned from it other than that evil acts occurred and that the older generation of Germans should kill themselves for their failure to act then.

The key evidence is the testimony of Ilana Mather (Alexandra Maria Lara), author of a memoir of how she and her mother survived. Hanna, unlike her fellow defendants, admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the ten women she chose during each month's Selektion were gassed. She denies authorship of a report on the church fire, despite pressure from the other defendants, but then admits it when asked to provide a handwriting sample.

Michael then realizes Hanna's secret: she is functionally illiterate and has concealed that her whole life. She joined the SS to avoid a job promotion that would have revealed it. Michael informs Rohl that he has information favorable to one of the defendants but is not sure what to do since she wants to avoid disclosing this. Rohl tells him that if he has learned nothing from the past there is no point in having the seminar.

Hanna receives a life sentence for her role in the church deaths while the other defendants get shorter terms. Michael meanwhile marries, has a daughter and divorces. Rediscovering his books and notes from the time of his affair, he begins reading them into a tape recorder. He sends the cassette tapes and a tape recorder to Hanna. Eventually she learns to read, and writes back to him.

Michael does not write back or visit, but keeps sending tapes, and in 1988 a prison official (Linda Basset) telephones him to seek his help with Hannah's transition into society upon her upcoming release. He finds a place for her to live and a job, and finally visits. The night before her release Hannah hangs herself and leaves a note to Michael and a tea tin with cash in it.

Later, Michael travels to New York. He meets Ilana (Lena Olin) and confesses his past relationship with Hanna. He tells her that Hanna was illiterate for most of her life, and that her suicide note told him to give both the cash, some money she had in a bank account and the tea tin to Ilana. Ilana tells Michael there is nothing to be learned from the camps. Michael suggests that he donate the money to a organization that combats adult illiteracy, preferably a Jewish one, and she agrees. Ilana keeps the tea tin since it is similar to one stolen from her in Auschwitz.

The film ends with Michael getting back together with his daughter, Julia, at Hanna's grave and telling her the story.

Starring
Kate Winslet
Ralph Fiennes
David Kross
Alexandra Maria Lara
Lena Olin
Bruno Ganz