Dave Snowdon

The Reader is not a film about redemption, nor forgiveness perhaps not even understanding. It is a film, I think, about shame, regret, love and the times that love is not enough to stop us from hurting those we love or enough to make us give the comfort the loved one seeks. It is a sad film, an emotional film, the sort of film that makes us wonder why and that is perhaps the best kind of film there is.

Michael, a young German, is only fifteen when, by chance, he meets a much older woman, Hanna, who helps him when he is sick. Months later they meet again and begin a passionate affair that lasts the whole summer. Hanna is not always an easy woman to be with, but she loves to be read to and it becomes clear that she loves Michael at least as much as he comes to love her though she seems naturally suspicious and finds it hard to express her feelings. It’s all the more puzzling then why she suddenly leaves town without a word on Michael’s sixteenth birthday. Is it because he is sixteen, because he avoided his own birthday party to be with her or because she was promoted from being a ticket collector on a tram to office work. Whatever the reason she leaves abruptly with no explanation.

Eight years later, in 1966, Michael is a law student and attends a Nazi war crimes trial he is shocked when Hanna appears as one of the defendants accused of being a guard at a concentration camp and of allowing over three hundred women to die in a fire. There are five other defendants who deny the charges against them, refuse to answer questions and point to Hanna as being the one in charge. Hanna for her part appears to answer the questions of the judges honestly and seems upset.

A lot of the above is apparent from the publicity for the film which makes much of the big secret that Hanna is protecting. If I’m honest this is why I came to see the film as I’m a sucker for mysteries - curiosity always gets the better of me. However, it’s also apparent by this point that the secret is no big secret at all and in fact the answer has been in front of us all along. To be honest if I’d known the "secret" was so banal I wouldn’t have gone to see the film and I would have been the poorer for it, since it is a film well worth seeing - the performances are stunning and the characters have a real emotional depth; they feel pain and you feel their pain with them.

Michael makes an attempt to see Hanna in prison but find himself unable to go through with it and meet the woman he loved knowing what he now knows. Hanna is found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Years later, Michael has been married, had a daughter and divorced. He finds his old school books at his parent’s house, records himself reading them and and sends the tapes to Hanna. The tapes give Hanna new life and she begins to write to Michael but he never replies or sends any letters of his own or any personal message of any kind, just the tapes of him reading the books.

In 1986, Hanna has been in prison for twenty years and is on the point of being released. The prison contacts Michael as the only person who has had any contact with Hanna in all this time even though he has never visited her and asks if he can help her on her release. Eventually, Michael manages to force himself to visit Hanna but though she loves him still he can’t bring himself to show her much warmth and though he’s arranged a place for her to live it’s clear that he’s not offering her any place in his life. A week later Michael comes to collect Hanna from prison, after decorating her new home, perhaps regretting his previous coldness he brings her flowers only to find she has committed suicide. She has left a note instructing the warden to tell Michael that she said "hello" and to give her remaining money to Michael for him to give to a woman who survived the fire.

Michael tracks the woman down to give her the money and though the woman is not able to offer any forgiveness for Hanna Michael does manage to find a kind of release.

Finally, in 1995, he takes his daughter to Hanna’s grave and starts to tell her what he has told no one else about a summer when he was fifteen years-old, met a woman and fell in love for the first and possibly the only time in his life.

One thing I liked about The Reader was that at no time did it attempt to excuse Hanna’s actions, claim she was not a bad person really or say that she was not aware of what she had done. In fact apart from the excerpts from the war crimes trial we are not told very much at all. It does seem that Hanna regrets her actions but most of all we are shown the effect on our lives that a simple choice can make: during the trial it was shown that just before she joined the SS Hanna was offered a job at Siemens but chose the SS because it was "a job" and from that one choice everything else flows. It’s never spelled out exactly why Hanna made that choice it seems clear, once we know her secret, that working for Siemens would have exposed it and made her shame public.

You want to know the secret? If you haven’t worked it out you’ll just have to go and see the film won’t you!