The Reader

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Bloodless adaptation of a good novel is almost rescued by Winslet at her best.

Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel

The Reader

was a morally complex, sobering meditation on the nature of intergenerational guilt and the corrosive power of silence. Its setting, in two different decades of post-war Germany, made the echoes of the Holocaust unmistakable, but those who condemn it as "Nazi porn" - seek to exercise rights of ownership that don't belong to them.

It will always be legitimate, even important, for historical events of unimaginable infamy to generate stories that adopt the tormentors' point of view.

The film, though, is an oddly bloodless affair, devoid of passion and lacking a moral centre of gravity. It's unfair to say it fails to do the book justice, since a film is allowed a life of its own, but, like the exasperatingly inert

The Hours

, director Daldry's previous collaboration with playwright David Hare, it's a muted, polite piece of work that seems to exult in its breeding. As a result, it convinces neither as a human drama nor as the earnest parable it so wants to be.

The story is of Michael (Kross), a teenager in a German provincial city in the 1950s, who meets, under strange but plausible circumstances, 30-something tram conductress Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), who promptly and sweetly seduces him. Their clandestine affair flourishes as a series of encounters in which he reads to her before they make love; her lust, for his words as much as his body, is almost palpable.

Her passion for his reading will be the basis of a dramatic revelation in the film's second half, though there is no shortage of hints in the first. Hanna abruptly vanishes one day and the next time Michael sees her, he's a law student (his professor, in a nice piece of casting, is played by Ganz who was Hitler in 2004's

Downfall

) and she is facing charges of mass murder before a war crimes tribunal. As her dark back-story begins to unspool, he faces an appalling choice.

The problem is that the film wants it both ways. In incarnating the novel's narrator as an adult, a successful but emotionally aloof lawyer in an antiseptically bright, yet somehow shadowy present, Daldry asks us to see this as a story of a life blighted by love's betrayals; but as the drama unfolds we are invited to consider much larger questions, about responsibility and collusion. And Berg, man and boy, looks trivial and slightly self-obsessed.

There's no denying that Winslet's Oscar-winning performance is concentrated, intelligent and beautifully poised: she never demands our sympathy, but she commands our attention even as, towards the end she seems to disappear before our eyes. But she's too good for the material she's working with. When the adult Michael's guilty fretting is dismissed by a camp survivor, played by the marvellously acid Olin, ("What do you think those places were - universities?") she might as well be chastising the filmmakers - and us, for being taken in.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz

Director:

Stephen Daldry

Running time:

124 mins

Rating:

R16 (sex scenes)