The holiday season: a time for family, friends, and the Third Reich. Just before Thanksgiving the Gene Siskel Film Center presented the Chicago premiere of Amos Gitai’s One Day You’ll Understand, in which a middle-aged businessman wonders what role his mother might have played in the deaths of her Jewish parents during the Holocaust. A few theaters have still been showing Mark Herman’s bathetic The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, about two little kids who forge a friendship from opposite sides of the barbed wire. For Christmas, Tom Cruise pulls on jackboots and an eyepatch to play Claus von Stauffenberg, the Nazi officer who conspired to assassinate Hitler, in Bryan Singer’s actioner Valkyrie; and Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a woman on trial for war crimes she committed as an SS officer at Auschwitz, in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader. So when you complain about having to watch It’s a Wonderful Life again, you do so at your peril.
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The revelation that Winslet’s character is a war criminal is the centerpiece of The Reader, but surrounding the Holocaust morality play is another story that’s more modestly scaled and, in this age of unashamed romance between older women and younger men, more contemporary. Adapted by David Hare from Bernhard Schlink’s engrossing novel, the movie unfolds from the perspective of Michael Berg (David Kross), who meets Hanna Schmitz in Neustadt in 1958. He’s 15, she’s 36, and though their steamy secret affair lasts for only a few months, at the end of which Hanna disappears, Michael never gets over her. They cross paths again in 1966, when Hanna goes on trial, and their bond endures into the late 80s, when Michael is middle-aged (and played by Ralph Fiennes) and Hanna is elderly. By that time, their relationship has undergone a painful role reversal, as the controlling, self-assured Hanna becomes the vulnerable one who needs looking after.
As the years pass and Hanna serves out a long prison term, Michael struggles to forgive her and sends her cassette tapes of himself reading books; comparing them to volumes checked out of the library, she teaches herself to read and on occasion sends him letters in a childish scrawl. When her release date nears, the warden asks Michael to become her guardian. “You’ve grown up, kid,” says Hanna when finally they meet again face-to-face.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button★★★★ Directed by David Fincher
