No, the biggest villain in Batman's gallery of rogues is none other than...Harvey Weinstein. Yes, Harvey the ballbuster, the guy infamous in Hollywood for multi-multi-million dollar eleventh hour Academy Award blitzkrieg marketing campaigns for his movies. Y'know, like the one he perpetrated in 1998 that got Shakespeare in Love to flat-out steal Best Picture honors from the far superior Saving Private Ryan? Apparently this year Harvey put the full-court press on The Reader prior to nomination time, and eked out a spot at the show for it, leaving The Dark Knight to twist in the wind.
So the question is: does The Reader deserve consideration for Best Picture? Is it a better movie than The Dark Knight? And the answer is: absolutely not.
For the first hour or so of this adaptation of Bernard Schlink's novel, Der Vorleser, I was lost in wondering where in the world the plot was meandering to. Boy meets older woman, boy beds older woman (repeatedly and graphically), boy falls in love with older woman (and she, apparently, with him), older woman ends up leaving boy. So far nothing remarkable or groundbreaking, and all I could think was that this was a Mary Kay Letourneau primer. Don't get me wrong, Kate Winslet doing full nudity is an impressive sight to behold, but after a half dozen shots of the bump-and-grind, I kind of get the picture.
The movie develops some meat later on, after Kate's character, Hanna Schmitz, has moved away, abandoning her hyper-hormonal sixteen-year-old paramour, Michael. Michael goes on to law school, learning the ways of the litigious, and is taken on a field trip to visit a trial. Turns out the trial is of a group of women accused of being SS guards at a Nazi camp, one that was a feeder for the furnaces of Auschwitz. At one point during the death march, 300 Jewish women were trapped inside a burning church, locked within by Hanna and company. Seeing his Hanna, after so many years apart, now standing in defense of her life, is a terrible burden for Michael to bear, and much of the rest of Act 2 is how he starts to unravel a little bit, his emotions conflicted between what he knew and what he now has learned. It affects him to the point that information he has that could save Hanna from a guilty conviction, is repressed, kept to himself in light of the horrible acts for which she is accused.
Act 3 is Hanna's transformation of sorts in prison, when a much older Michael (played by Ralph Fiennes) breaks through his wall of shame and embarks on a journey that is truly heartwarming and wonderful. You see, young Michael didn't just make daily booty calls to his illicit lover, he also read to her dozens of books. Classics, comics, trash, even Lady Chatterley's Lover, he read them to her by the piles. And there's a reason for it, not just that she liked the dulcet tones of his voice. And no, she wasn't blind. Older Michael, armed with a tape recorder and a microphone, returns to those magic moments, and sends Hanna care packages of his books on tape, which she uses to teach herself how to read and write. It's a beautiful and ultimately tragic (as these stories need to be) story.
The problem is, much of the movie plays as if someone took the script and pulled out every fifth page. Some scenes seem to cut to the next without cohesion. There's a subplot involving Michael's family and his estrangement that isn't fully explained or at least hinted at enough for the viewer to fill in the blanks. The reason for older Michael to be withdrawn from his own daughter, or why his marriage fails, isn't sussed out enough, either. And for all talk of Kate Winslet's fantastic make-up to age her during her prison sentence, even that is overblown: she's supposed to be 68 when she's released, and yet she looks 88. And the camera cuts in the final scene between Lena Olin and Ralph Fiennes are terrible on a Vincent Gallo level.
The bottom line is that for a two hour movie (two-oh-four, to be exact), it's great for roughly 50 minutes. And that's not straight, either. It comes in fits and starts. More time should have been spent on Hanna's trial and the moral quagmire that it conjured up, with less time on the late-night Cinemax quality of relationship establishment. The ending was too much, and should have been truncated at least ten minutes. The acting is wonderful, from all parts, and Kate Winslet shines, which probably comes as a shock to no one.
Now, The Dark Knight isn't without its problems, and it's far from a perfect movie (like Gladiator is), but it is far and away a better movie than The Reader. It really is a shame that the former got shut out of the big event simply because it was out-politcked. In the end, I think it'll be a moot point, as Slumdog Millionaire is this year's best of breed, but still, it would have been nice to see Batman get some props.
