One Of The Best Movies That I Have Ever Seen...Perhaps The Best

The Reader is not a film about sex, or Nazis, or the Holocaust, although each of these are central elements in the movie. Instead, it is a movie about how we as human beings act toward other human beings who are deficit in one, or more, respects.

There have been, are, and always will be people in society who go about their lives just like everyone else. They are born and raised in homes right next to yours. They go to school, get jobs, get married, raise families, and go on vacation just like everyone else does. But what lies behind these external actions is lacking. There is a lack of understanding. There is a lack of adequate reasoning. There is a lack of integration that makes one responsible in society. There is a vacant psychology.

And there is a flip side to this as well. Those who go through the same motions externally and who benefit from their own adaptive social behaviours can do so simply by being programmed without any real compassion toward those who are deficit. These, too, have no greater understanding of the complexities of life than do the people who are at a loss.

The Reader focuses on the life of Hanna Schmitz. Socially she knows what to do when she finds a sick fifteen-year-old on her doorstep, Michael Berg. She takes him in, cleans him up, and helps him make his way back home. And in spite of his sickness there is physical attraction between the two of them. Physical attraction is natural. When the boy eventually returns to say thank you an affair begins. Is it teen infatuation with a beautiful woman twice his age? Yes. Is it love? Of course it is...on his part. But there is something off about Hanna. An intergenerational affair is nothing out of the ordinary, although it is taboo (and there are manytaboos in this movie). Hanna is not put off by this, which is not extraordinary. Nevertheless, her words and sometimes hostile reactions key the viewer that there are underlying deficiencies in her ability to integrate her thinking, and physical and emotional attachments. Hanna runs on physical instinct and enculturated protocols. She is child-like in many respects: she asks to be read to, and is deeply moved (jealous?) at hearing a children’s choir, alternately crying and laughing. Is she mourning the loss of her not having experienced this, and at the same time overjoyed at listening to them? Then she gets a job promotion, the opportunity to work in an office. And with that she promptly disappears, leaving the young Michael devastatingly heart broken. He turns inward the rest of his life.

Years later he, as a law student, attends the trial of Nazi female prison camp guards who committed atrocities. Hanna Schmitz is one of those on the dock. He is devastated. During the trial it becomes clear to Michael that Hanna is illiterate. Her childlikeness emerges during her testimonies, but receives no recognition from the court. Michael’s law professor at the time reminds his class at one point that societies do not function by morals, but by laws. And in the end Hanna is framed by her co-defendants for having written a report detailing a war crime. Deeply conflicted Michael remains silent with what he knows about her illiteracy, and she, too ashamed to admit that she cannot read or write is sentenced to life in prison. Michael withdraws into himself and becomes an enigma to his own family.

Years later he begins sending tape recordings of the books that he read to her during their affair. From these she finds the strength to begin to learn to read (is she dyslexic?). And as she approaches a release date 20 years from her imprisonment he is contacted and asked to sponsor her after her release. He asks her if she learned anything in prison? Her answer is once again deficit. He agrees to set her up, but in a very perfunctory manner. And Hanna takes her life before her release, which is just perhaps the most honest and profound act of understanding that she ever committed in her life.

Hanna wills the small amount of money she has managed to save to one of the survivors who managed to survive her depredations. Michael delivers the money to a now mature woman living a lavish lifestyle. She is emotionally cold and severely ideological. This is who has inherited the earth in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The words of the professor, that societies run by laws and not morals, sting the viewer as she rejects the money but keeps an item of Hanna’s as what? ...a token? ...a memento? ...a link to her own suffering so that she may keep alive her own emotional disfigurement that is blessed by society even as it disregards the deficits of others? Micheal Berg returns home and begins his own journey to a deeper self-understanding.

There is no excuse for the lives of others who are deficit. No reason why. No amount of work or good will to be done that will set them right. But the film is really about examining ourselves and our self-righteousness and aggrandizing behaviours that are simultaneously inhuman and inhumane. But reading the reviews of what is one of the best movies ever made it is clear that most people simply do not get it. Only those who can empty themselves will.