"The Reader": crítico vs. guionista

En "The Guardian", el crítico Peter Bradshaw destrozó la película de Stephen Daldry "The Reader", cuyo guión fue escrito por el reconocido autor David Hare. El propio Hare le respondió brutalmente a Bradshaw. Y ahora es Bradshaw el que recoge el guante y sigue la discusión, que me parece interesante. En la nota de Bradsaw hay links tanto a su crítica como a otras críticas, y también a la respuesta de Hare. En inglés, claro...

By Peter Bradhsaw

Some weeks ago, I wrote about Stephen Daldry's movie The Reader, the story of Michael, a teenage boy in 1950s Germany, who has an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet, who likes him to read aloud to her. He discovers in later adulthood that this woman had kept from him a terrible secret. She was a camp guard at Auschwitz.

In my review, I absented myself from the broad critical consensus that this film was a good thing. Despite the supremely high calibre of its contributors - and with Kate Winslet as star, Stephen Daldry as director and David Hare as writer, this surely is a triple-A-team we're talking about - I felt it was a glib, facile film in which the Holocaust is questionably invoked to lend depth to a tale of titillation and sentimentality.

This view was contested in our letters page by Professor Julian Dodd of the University of Manchester and in today's paper you can read the transcript of an onstage discussion with David Hare himself, the film's screenwriter who adapted the original novel by Bernhard Schlink, hosted by my colleague Michael Billington. In this, Hare gives my review a withering response, which I confess, on first reading, put me in mind of the maxim of the author, comedian and Palestinian activist Jeremy Hardy: sarcasm is the highest form of wit - I don't think.

As far as The Reader goes, I am certainly in a minority, but not a minority of one. Here you can read Manohla Dargis in the New York Times and Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

Admirers of the film raise what they see as the film's central issue. In Germany, ordinary people with ordinary lives, people who did not have devil-horns and a tail - ordinary, decent people like you and me, in fact - were effectively complicit under various levels of coercion in various levels of evil. I agree with what I take to be David Hare's point that this is a profoundly important question in European history; it is, in part, the question that Hanna flings at her judge: "What would you have done?"

But The Reader does not seriously engage with the question. In invoking the Holocaust, it bites off much more than it has any intention of chewing. Hanna's sympathetic ordinariness is lavishly established, but what exactly she is supposed to have done at Auschwitz and how exactly she feels about it later is cloudy. In fact, the issue becomes hardly more than a tragi-historical style accessory to a sexy and sad love story - allegedly made more poignant by Hanna's illiteracy - and whose ultimate importance turns out to be Michael's own personal journey of emotional healing in middle age.

Hanna, tremendously played by Winslet, is apparently guilty of monstrous acts, and the discovery of this guilt initally appears to supercharge the film with drama and importance. But we never get to see what exactly these monstrous acts were; she never shows any clear sign of understanding or repentance, and her silence on the subject of anti-Semitism is not challenged or even noticed. She is ashamed of her illiteracy - but not, it appears, particularly ashamed of having been a Nazi camp-guard. Even her final devastating act doesn't make her feelings entirely clear.

Now, Hanna's behaviour may have been entirely typical of those guilty of lower-level war-crimes. Like Hanna in the movie's trial-scene, they might have maintained a manner of bafflement and pain and defensiveness. Hanna was, after all, obeying orders. People like Hanna might well gone into a kind of denial, a willed amnesia - but there is no reason for a cinema audience to share that condition, however gallantly they sympathise with her illiteracy or need for love. I am here incidentally sticking to the idea that Hanna Schmitz is a fictional creation, entire of herself, despite reports that in Bernhard Schlink's original novel she may have been based on the real-life Buchenwald guard Ilse Koch. Reading about Koch is certainly a bracing lesson in historical reality after watching The Reader.

Of course, I wouldn't want Kate Winslet to play the part like a snarling Nazi, goosestepping back and forth across her apartment like Freddie Starr. The subtlety and clarity of her technique is a marvel. It always is. And this role, along with her performance in Revolutionary Road, lands a mighty double-whammy. But I couldn't sit still for the way her character's guilt-free vulnerability was romanticised and permitted to loom larger on screen than her (sketchily conceived) involvement in Auschwitz.

Professor Dodd, in his interesting and measured letter, says that the film's point "lies in demonstrating that vulnerability can play a part in leading one - anyone, perhaps - to commit acts of barely comprehensible wickedness." Perhaps so. But if by "vulnerability" we mean Hanna's illiteracy, well, it does not appear to be that which led her to acts of wickedness. It is rather that her continuing shame at this illiteracy leads her to confess, in court, to a specific wickedness of which she is in fact innocent. So as well as being beautiful and possessed of a pathetic yearning for literature, she has been wrongly convicted.

Brooding on The Reader after seeing it, I found myself thinking of CP Taylor's 1981 play Good, now filmed with Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs. That is a play about how ordinary, decent people could allow themselves to be gathered up into Nazism, how they could find themselves donating their own reputations and modest achievements to shore up the Nazi power structure. That was a play which wanted to investigate the question of how ordinary people become evil - but unlike The Reader, Taylor's play ultimately wants to look evil in the face. He shows how people's ordinariness does not exempt them from seeing the truth about themselves: that it is the vanity and weakness and smugness that is present in all people - from the highest to the lowest, from the nicest to the nastiest - that makes them eligible for fascism. That is their "vulnerability".

And as it happens, I also can't help remembering David Hare's plays Plenty and Licking Hitler, whose power and subtlety far exceeded the contrived mawkishness of The Reader - plays which show how the past (specifically the past experience of World War Two) lives powerfully and vividly and relevantly in the present.