“C+” Rating by Robert W. Hammerle

“The Reader” is not so much depressing as it is fundamentally disturbing. Quite frankly, I haven’t seen a really good romantic film involving a guard at a Nazi death camp since “The Night Porter” (1974). Thankfully, that emotional void has been filled and I am one with the world again.

Yes, Kate Winslet is spectacular as a conflicted former servant of the Third Reich on the run, but who cares? Needy and isolated, she seduces a 15-year-old boy (David Kross) over one hot (and I do mean hot) summer and effectively ruins his life. What’s there not to like about such a moving theme? After all, love is a many splendored thing, isn’t it?

Like most 15-year-olds, Kross falls madly in love with Winslet. He is completely fixated on making love to her. Strangely, she has him read to her from novels he is studying as a matter of foreplay, and I’ll let you guess where this well done but tawdry film gets its title.

But alas, all good things, including child molestation, must come to an end. Hanna (Winslet) abruptly disappears, and young Michael Berg (Kross) is devastated - in a romantic way, of course. And having effectively abandoned all meaningful contact with family and friends he remained devastated for life - in a romantic way, of course.

Years later as a law student, he sees Hanna on trial as a war criminal. He hears testimony of her selecting woman for the gas chamber. He is again re-devastated - but again in a loving way, of course.

Fast forward 20 years when he has become the middle aged Michael Berg, also known as Ralph Fiennes. Nobody, but nobody, does devastation better than the talented Mr. Fiennes. Name a better brooder, I dare you.

He was a psychotic brooder in “Schindler’s List” (1993); a cheating brooder in “Quiz Show” (1994); a crying brooder carrying a dead lover in “The English Patient” (1996); a star crossed brooder in love with another man’s wife in “The End of the Affair” (1999); a brooding cannibal in the “Red Dragon” (2002); a brooding widower in “The Constant Gardener” (2005) and a brooding nobleman in “The Duchess” (2008), to name a few.

In “Reader,” he is an emotionally stunted man whose life long fixation with a youthful affair with an older woman has left him alienated from life. If his re-discovery of Hanna as she is about to be paroled after years in prison is suppose to inspire anything meaningful in him or the audience, it fails. Hanna is a convicted mass murderer. Michael is an emotional zombie. Romance over.

It is a tribute to the immense talents of writer David Hare and Director Stephen Daldry that “The Reader” is even watchable. Again, it is remarkable that Ms. Winslet can breathe life into a character with no soul.

What a perfect movie for the holiday season. As for me, I’d just as soon see Harvey Fierstein play Dick Cheney in drag in a musical called “The Bush Years” - It Ain’t Over - Even When it’s Over.” Now that would be romantic.