By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to the Stephen Daldry-directed, David Hare-penned 2008 drama The Reader, starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes and David Kross.
The Reader? What the fuck is that movie? Everyone loved it? Huh? WTF? Yep, like a lot of movies produced and released by now-infamous-grub-but-always-a-fucking-arsehole Harvey Weinstein’s company Miramax, cineastes have tried to forget about The Reader, but back in 2008, they all lost their shit over this WW2-themed drama. It even copped five Oscar nominations, with horribly overrated leading lady Kate Winslet taking out the gong for Best Actress. Anyway, you might have forgotten about it, but you can read all about it here…The Reader is shit.
If you’re like me and you crave enjoyment from your celluloid addiction, then you too would probably have thought seriously about cutting your losses and just walking out of Stephen Daldry’s 2008 “masterpiece” The Reader after the first twenty minutes…then on the half hour…and then every five minutes until something finally happens halfway through the film.
The Reader’s first excruciating half follows Michael Berg, an impressionable, innocent teenage boy who reads, usually naked, to a woman twice his age. That’s it. Now, I don’t mind a slow first act. Sure, not every film can be Rambo, but The Reader is tedious to the point where I thought that someone was having a laugh with me. Surely no film could linger so obliviously without it being a self-indulgent Director’s Cut? But no, this was the edited film nominated for five – count them, five! – Academy Awards. Laughable.
The film is perhaps elevated from a six-car pile-up, including a gas tanker, to merely a serious head-on collision, by a second half that seems to suddenly realise that a story has to have a point. The narrative jumps forward, and it turns out that the enigmatic older woman, played by the typically mediocre Kate Winslet, is actually a Nazi war criminal…but don’t hate her just yet, folks!
She’s a Nazi war criminal who can’t read! Well, that makes it alright then. Daldry would no doubt tell you that he wanted to show the woman in an objective light, allowing the audience to make up their own minds about her, but it’s plainly obvious that his intention was always to portray the character with nothing less than sympathy. Maybe he was trying to be evocative? Either way, it was certainly lost on me.
Ralph Fiennes and David Kross team up to play the adult and teenage Michael Berg, respectively, and they do their best, but even they couldn’t stop me from comparing The Reader unfavourably to that equally forgotten flick The Horse Whisperer, the only film that really rivals it in terms of having a complete lack of pace and narrative drive. Daldry’s direction is dreary, and the script, adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s book of the same name by the “revered” David Hare, is more schmaltzy than poignant.
In summary, this is definitely one to leave alone if you value your time. If anything, I suggest that you bypass it and go straight to Daldry’s next offering, rumoured to be titled Watching Paint Dry…Naked.
