Review – The Reader

Kate Winslett is hands-down the best part of this movie. And I’m not talking about the truly gratuitous amount of nudity she does, either. Instead, I was more impressed with some of the subtleties she managed to work into her character’s appearance and behavior as the plot ping-ponged back and forth in a range of years from the 50s to the 90s. Other than her performance, however, the production was fairly terrible. Though the conversion of the Holocaust into a tragic romance might – might – have worked, here it clearly doesn’t. The characters’ many moral “ambiguities” aren’t borderline cases at all. Instead we get crimes ranging from child molestation to mass murder that are all supposed to be subsumed by a boy’s bittersweet love for an illiterate former concentration camp guard. Though the production values are solid and the female lead’s performance worthy of the Oscar she received, the script largely undoes whatever potential the picture might have had. Mildly amusing