The only flaw in Kate Winslet's performance in The Reader is perhaps Kate Winslet's performance in Extras but a few short years ago. In the brilliant 1/2-hour Ricky Gervais comedy, Winslet, playing herself, takes the role of a WWII-era nun hiding a group of Jews from the Nazis. Between takes, she bemoans her lack of Oscar wins and cites it as the main reason she took the role.
Holocaust films, she says, are tickets to award season. "How many more movies do we need about the Holocaust? I mean, we get it. It was grim. Move on,” she said, typifying the show's caustic approach to comedy. The line was obviously meant to demonstrate the decidedly callous approach some actors have to their material (see also Kirk Lazurus's explanation of playing the mentally challenged in Tropic Thunder).
And while Winslet was merely reciting lines given to her for the show, it is difficult to sit through The Reader and not think that the film is designed partially with earning awards in mind. This is not a slight on her performance in the film, but rather the film itself. For whenever Winslet does not appear, it exudes a certain stoic, stifled prestige that smells suspiciously packaged to hand off to Academy Awards voters.
Winslet plays Hannah, a bus conductor living in Germany circa the 1950s. When she finds a young lad in front of her home afflicted with the early stages of scarlet fever, she comes to his rescue. He later returns to thank Hannah for her generosity, igniting a torrid May-December romance marked by secrecy, sex, literature, and more sex. The boy is named Michael (played by David Kross – not to be confused with the American comedian), and he finds illicit fun and escape from his prim upbringing by clandestine romps with Hannah that are punctuated by him reading to her from his school-assigned novels.
That's one way to inspire kids to read.
As the flame of their incendiary affair begins to diminish, so does our interest in the film. When Hannah vanishes, Michael pines the loss, but still manages to move onward and upward, landing in law school under the wing of an esteemed professor.
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Article comments
1 - Judy Sprague
Liked the movie very much, but, had a hard time following the time line. I thought her affair with Michael was after the war; however at the trial the judge referred to her s.s. connections after her job as a conductor and a promotion????
2 - Judy Sprague
.....which was after her affair.