I saw The Reader with a friend last night, and was it ever bad. Even though I didn’t think the Revolutionary Road movie was that good, it is better than The Reader by far. The Reader is far more melodramatic, and it is generally very predictable. I also thought, for the first section of the film, that it was just meant to appeal to the fantasies of middle-aged women. This is because it is basically all about the Kate Winslet & David Kross characters screwing, with many nude scenes. Despite the fact that they profess to love each other, it’s pretty much all about lust. He’ll read her some Latin or Greek from the books he’s studying in school, and she’ll say it’s “beautiful,” even though she has no idea what he’s saying. Then they’ll screw. Then he’ll read her some Homer or Chekhov, and she’ll be really moved by that—then they’ll fuck. But what woman doesn’t have her panties melt when some guy reads some of The Odyssey before sex, right?The rest of the movie uses the Holocaust and the Winslet character’s role as an SS guard for it’s dramatic power. This is tedious, given how many bad movies have done the same thing. There are some lame discussions between a law professor and his students that are supposed to bring up relevant “philosophical” issues but that are just trite, and a very silly scene at the end between the grown-up schoolboy character (played by Ralph Fiennes) and a Holocaust survivor, where the two of them decide that the money left by the now-dead Winslet character be donated to a Jewish organization for illiteracy. Winslet’s character was illiterate for most of her life, and allowed herself to be given a harsher sentence for her crimes because she was too ashamed to provide a writing sample and thus admit that she was illiterate.
This is one of those movies where the script is bad and is the main reason the film is bad. The acting by the leads is ok, but it can’t really overpower the melodrama and predictable aspects of the film. The film itself has a very ordinary and unremarkable look to it, and the director was one who was also responsible for The Hours, another melodramatic film from a few years back. Oh, and I read that the novel this film was based on was an Oprah Pick. All of those things put together sound like a good recipe for bad art.Before the film started, there was also a trailer for another film involving Nazis, this time directed by Quentin Tarantino. It looked really bad. This is why I don't bother to pay for movies that are in theatrical release anymore, and just use those 'points' programs to see them for free. So many of them are just bad and forgettable.
Here's the trailer for The Reader:
