When The Reader was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, it was rightly criticized as being undeserving (though certainly many worse films have been nominated, and even won). There’s no denying that its filmmaking is horridly clunky, and that its style is an odd mix of muddledness and hamfistedness. However, despite its weaknesses, I think many people didn’t give it its due. One aspect often criticized is the seeming slightness of the central “mystery” (that Winslet’s character is illiterate); many people criticized the film for using the character’s illiteracy to somehow try to justify her horrendous actions in the Holocaust. Obviously, it is no justification. But there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on in the film, and not much of it has to do with the Holocaust.
The point is that for Winslet’s character, her illiteracy was defining and pervasive. Everything she experienced was experienced in terms of it. It was an essential component of her entire way of life—withdrawn and defensive, closed off from the world, going through the motions of living while in a self-induced state of perpetual guilt and isolation. Like Ralph Fiennes’ character, we might wish that her guilt was related to her actions during the Holocaust rather than to her illiteracy. But the whole point of the movie is that that’s not the case, and that certain, perhaps seemingly trivial things weigh on us and define our mode of being—including our mode of being ethical creatures—whether we like it or not.
However, the crux of the film is not that particular seemingly trivial thing, or its importance to Winslet’s mode of being. The crux of the film is its importance, and that of Winslet in general, to Fiennes‘ way of being. His affair with her is definitive for him in the same way that her illiteracy is for her: it colors everything else throughout his life. And this is reinforced, and given a particular ethical character, when he withholds his evidence at her trial. He withholds it precisely because of her overwhelming importance to him, which he wants to overcome by ignoring her situation (and by getting it on with a sexy young girl)—but in doing so, he becomes burdened by his own guilt, and henceforth he becomes doubly defined by his relationship to her. He feels the need to finally free himself of her influence and absolve himself of his guilt by understanding her and helping her to remove her own guilt. He wants everything to be “cleared up” in this way; he wants to bring her out into a disclosedness, an ethical state in which she can look outside herself and accept her guilt for her role in the Holocaust and for her role in his life. And everybody could understand everybody and everybody could move past the past. But this is his goal. This is what weighs on him, not on her; she only wants to escape her isolated being in order to find love or companionship. And that difference, which in the end precludes the possibility of him understanding or forgiving her (and hence being able to forget her and forgive himself), is a significant portion of what weighs on him.
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Tags: Holocaust, life events, movies, Oscars
June 19, 2011 at 2:00 pm |
[...] The Reader (Daldry, 2008); or, melvillian.wordpress.com [...]