There are four or five human objects competing for our pity in
Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, which was adapted by
David Hare from a German novel by Bernhard Schlink — and if
that’s not enough for you, there are six million more lurking in
the background whose demands upon our sorely taxed sympathies
might have been expected to feature just a bit more prominently.
Instead we have two principal incitements to compassion. One is a
beautiful, sensitive and even intelligent woman who happens to be
illiterate, is deeply ashamed of the fact and who shyly seeks out
people to satisfy a rather improbable hunger for highbrow
literature — wouldn’t romance novels be more her speed in real
life? — by reading aloud to her. The other is a former
concentration camp guard too stupid, or at least morally obtuse,
to do otherwise than obey orders but who nevertheless learns to
suffer terrible, soul-destroying remorse, years later, for having
done so.
That these two pitiable figures are combined in the same woman,
Hannah Schmitz (Kate Winslet), introduces an incoherence and
sense of moral dislocation that would be fatal to the film even
if it were not parasitic for its emotional juice on the
Holocaust. In other words, poor Hannah is suspiciously
overqualified for our pity, both because she needs that extra bit
of emotional oomph to escape the gravitational pull of the Jewish
victims that weigh her down and because pity is all that the film
has to offer us — pity not just for Hannah but for her damaged
teenage lover, Michael (David Kross), his depressed and
emotionally unavailable adult self (Ralph Fiennes), and for the
mother and daughter who alone survive her salient act of devotion
to duty as a concentration camp guard. The two Michaels are also
pitiable because they have, or have had, a remote, emotionally
unavailable and probably tyrannical father.
As I may have had occasion to mention before, pity is emotionally
and artistically inert. The only artistic — really,
quasi-artistic — experience it can give us is one of feeling
rather pleased with ourselves for having the correct,
compassionate feelings about those whose lives do not touch ours
at any point, apart from being the objects of our compassion.
That’s why Aristotle combined pity and terror as the emotions he
believed to be evoked by tragedy. The terror gave the pity
something to combine with that made it artistically productive:
terror that we might find ourselves in the tragic hero’s
predicament and therefore could not stand aloof from it, as pity
would otherwise allow us to do.
There is one moment in The Reader where Messrs.
Daldry and Hare try to evoke something like this sense of
connection between their audience and the central event in their
heroine’s life. It occurs during a courtroom scene in which the
judge (Burghart Klaussner) looks down, judgmentally, upon Hannah
as defendant, attempting to make her feel ashamed of the atrocity
for which she is on trial, and she replies, simply, “What would
you have done?” But though the judge is supposed to be nonplused
by her question, it is a false one. What he would have done is to
have unlocked the doors of the church in which she had allowed
300 Jewish women to burn to death in an air-raid. It is what any
of us enlightened, post-war liberals would have done. Or think we
would have done.
But the whole point about Hannah is that she is not
an enlightened, post-war liberal. She is a bit of human
flotsam from the Nazi shipwreck whose utter remoteness from us —
made even more unbridgeable by her illiteracy — insulates her
from any feelings except those of pity. Or possibly anger, which
is given voice to by one of Michael’s fellow law students at the
suggestion that the poor guards didn’t really know what they were
doing, or what the fate of their prisoners would be. “Everyone
knew. The question is, how could you let this happen? Why did you
not kill yourself when you found out?” And then he adds, “Put the
gun in my hand, and I will shoot her myself. Shoot them all.” A
little over the top, maybe, but at least it gives us a brief and
somewhat bracing vacation from the pity party.
Either because Hannah’s pathos is so overdetermined or for some
other reason, I find that which Mr. Fiennes attempts to evoke on
behalf of her former lover particularly irksome. He is introduced
to us in the film’s first scene, set in 1995 — most of the story
is told in a series of flashbacks to 1958, 1966, 1976, 1980 and
1988 (not, however, 1945) — making breakfast for and bidding
farewell to a casual lover whose inability to penetrate his
emotional reserve is intended as an explanation, I guess, of his
seemingly constant state of unhappiness. He also has a daughter
(Hannah Herzsprung) to whom he apologizes for unspecified
neglect. His secret sorrow may have something to do with his
premature loss of innocence to Hannah, or his silence during her
trial, but either way, set against the emotional maelstrom of the
rest of the movie, it looks pretty, well, pathetic.
Also, when he asks to visit Hannah in prison in order to persuade
her to reveal her secret and so incur a lesser sentence than life
imprisonment, he chickens out at the last minute. Is this meant
to be seen as an act of moral cowardice echoing her own? Or has
he simply decided to respect her decision to keep her illiteracy
a secret even at the cost of the heavier sentence? It hardly
matters. Once again, the sense of psychological damage to
him in such a context seems annoyingly irrelevant
and a reinforcement of the soap operaish, disease-of-the-week
aspect of the movie. That it ends — spoiler alert! — with his
telling Hannah’s story to the daughter seems to be meant to be a
kind of resolution/absolution because it means he is becoming
more emotionally engaged. Hurrah! The Holocaust seems a long way
off, now that the movie has trotted out that favorite Hollywood
trope of reducing inhibition and emotional detachment for
therapeutic purposes. His pity may not be enough to effect
Hannah’s salvation, but it works a treat with his own.
