The Reader, round 2. And Holocaust movies as "one of Hollywood's most unlikely staples."

"I respectfully request a moratorium on Holocaust films." Stuart Klawans in Nextbook: "By continually replaying and reframing and reinventing the past, these movies are starting to cloud the very history they claim to commemorate. Call it the law of diminishing returns - or call it a paradox that mirrors the Torah's famously self-contradictory commandment at the end of Parshat Ki Tetze, concerning the people who were the prototype of Nazi Germany: 'Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.' Very soon, with Holocaust movies, we'll need to forget if we want to remember."

"[T]he Holocaust movie is one of Hollywood's most unlikely staples in any season," writes Annette Insdorf. "They are still as much a product of their times as of their historical inspiration.... What's remarkable about this year's releases is the acknowledgment that we no longer need the neat Hollywood ending."

Updated through 12/13.

Also in Newsweek, David Ansen: "Bernhard Schlink's The Reader was a terse, morally complex, erotically charged novel that examined the impact of German guilt on the generation born after the Holocaust. Director Stephen Daldry (The Hours) and playwright David Hare have taken up the challenge of turning this double-edged, cerebral book into a film, and it's not surprising - movies being better at the visible than the internal - that the eroticism trumps the moral complexity."

In the New York Times, Ariel Kaminer tells the story of an adaptation that "required a series of increasingly complex translations over the course of more than a decade: from German to English, from a book to a film, from Europe to America, from a solitary meditation to something that could fill theaters, and from its original cultural context to something international - ultimately to return it home, the same, and yet changed."

Earlier: AO Scott on this year's Holocaust movies; and of course, round 1.

Updates, 12/8: "In a risky move, Daldry chose to screen the completely finished version of The Reader for the first time at Manhattan's 92 nd Street Y, at Columbia professor Dr Annette Insdorf's premiere film series, Reel Pieces," writes Matt Mazur in PopMatters:

The venue is also a vital Jewish community center, where the topics of empathy, and even sympathy, for a Nazi war criminal were bound to provoke a divisive reaction amongst the audience, many of whom were old enough to possess a living memory of World War II's atrocities.

On the street following the screening, I overheard some elderly audience members having a strongly-worded conversation about Winslet's character and they seemed deeply offended that such sensitive treatment would be given to a Nazi collaborator. Others in the audience questioned Daldry (who was, in turn, questioned by Insdorf following the film), about whether or not he believed all guards at the camps were like Hanna. "This is one story about one guard," he carefully answered, noting that Insdorf, one of the world's leading Holocaust film scholars, advised him on all dubious matters, and that her book, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust was an important reference while shooting.

Ah. So that's why Newsweek asked her to write that piece.

"[W]as there really no one, from the fierce new wave of German filmmakers, prepared to dramatize the Schlink?" asks Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Or did they feel, as I did, that it was pernicious from the start - a low-grade musing on atrocity, garnished with erotic titillation? Imprisoned for life, Hanna must read to herself, but are we really supposed to be moved by the thought - or now, in Daldry's film, by the sight - of an unrepentant Nazi parsing Chekhov? That is not culturally nourishing; it is morally famished."

Gabriel Shanks finds The Reader to be "unquestionably the smartest, most engaging, and most important film of the season."

"Daldry and Hare's film has the stately polish and thoughtfulness that's come to define award-courting season, a sort of faux-highbrow atmosphere whose measured deliberateness, when matched by intense star turns, implies prestige," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Yet even a minor peek underneath this elegant surface reveals clunky conventions and superficial shorthand dramatizations, both of which are delivered with self-important sophistication intended to mask the fact that the affair is no more graceful or profound than your average Hollywood mediocrity."

Kate Winslet's Hanna "recounts inhuman actions with a blank, almost childlike matter-of-factness, the idea of 'just following orders' not as an excuse but as a matter of unquestioned responsibility to a job," writes Sean Axmaker. "Winslet's performance in these scenes is unsettling and unexpected because it carries no sense of moral responsibility and no remorse. The film leaves it up to us whether it's because she doesn't feel remorse, or because she doesn't dare allow herself to even consider the issue lest she is unable to live with the answer. One would hope that, come Oscar time, the Academy would favor this more fearless and ambiguous performance to that of Revolutionary Road, though I find both films more calculated than expressive of anything beyond their own self-conscious pedigree."

Update, 12/9: For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Daldry "about today's decline in literacy, the children's film he'd like to make, and why The Reader shouldn't be considered a Holocaust movie."

Updates, 12/10: "Paradoxically, Mr Hare's apparent attempt to deepen or underline the novel's ideas about the past informing the present, by kinking up its linear chronology with flashbacks, proves crippling: scrambling the time frame, so that the story repeatedly points to the past, only exposes the deep vein of self-pity that runs through the novel, flattening Mr Schlink's already unpersuasive bid at generational soul-seeking." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "You could argue that the film isn't really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation."

"Sidestepping the usual Auschwitz-camp footage and unfolding mostly in a dingy bedroom and a provincial courthouse, The Reader strives to honor Schlink's restraint and his struggle to avoid cliché," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "But like many narrative filmmakers who walk on their tippy-toes when dealing with the Holocaust, neither Daldry nor Hare seems eager to make the material his own. Add to their timidity a pack of production troubles - including a distracted director who was simultaneously working on the Broadway version of Billy Elliot, two feral executives (Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin) scrapping publicly over the release date, and the death of two beloved producers (Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack) during production - and it's not hard to see why the movie version came out such a flat, respectful pudding."

Daldry "has once again made the kind of movie that's designed to leave you feeling virtuous rather than truly engaged," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "It's hard to hate The Reader: It's a perfunctory piece of work that takes no chances, and it features some good performances. But I wonder if anyone will truly love it, either. It courts approval, not passion; you can applaud it without having to remove your gloves."

"Obviously made with Oscar - and only Oscar - in mind, The Reader is chockablock with some of the most absurd 'prestige' moments I've ever seen in a motion picture," blogs Ed Gonzalez.

"Like other recent successful films about emotional repression (2005's Brokeback Mountain and the forthcoming Revolutionary Road, for instance), The Reader is most moving precisely in its rigorous restraint, directorial and performance-wise," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"[W]atching Daldry try to tuck the horrors of Nazi Germany into neat little hospital corners made for a singularly unsatisfying (however tidy) experience," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

Erica Abeel talks with Daldry for indieWIRE.

Online listening tip. Ralph Fiennes is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"The story dares to hint at a certain smugness in the attitudes of its victims, which is something we are not at all used to in movies of this kind," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "And as a romance, at times feverish and other times grim, the film works surprisingly well. There's something gripping about the relationship between this ill-assorted pair, and something touching about the way events beyond their control or understanding reach out to blight their lives."

"[M]y self-proclaimed cinematic omnivorousness reaches its limit when it comes to those end-of-year Miramaxian prestige pictures directed by people like Scott Hicks, Anthony Minghella, and Stephen Daldry," writes Paul Matwychuk:

Your Cold Mountains, your The Hourses, your Shines, your Snow Falling on Cedarses.... The actors' accents and costumes are usually impeccable - noticeably impeccable, in a way that makes you feel you'd be remiss not to comment on them approvingly. Not to paint with too wide a brush here, but they tend to be movies favoured by the daily newspaper reviewers but rejected by critics writing for film journals and websites. It must baffle many newspaper readers to hear someone pan a movie like The Hours, especially since the negative response tends to be based not on the specific story of the film or the performances, but a rejection of the film's entire aesthetic - an aesthetic whose primary goal, after all, is to impress moviegoers with the film's very excellence of quality.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that The Reader... is not my kind of movie.

"The economy that marked Bernard Schlink's novel about moral impasses and emotional dysfunction amongst two generations Germans in the decades after the Holocaust goes untranslated," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. "Daldry spoonfeeds feeling through score, he gives us long, indulgent sex scenes with an oft-naked Kate Winslet, years too young for the character she plays, draped in improbably golden light. And yet, within the wrappings of a film clearly, carefully calibrated for Academy favor by a distributor who couldn't be in greater need of such recognition, The Reader's unwillingness to clean up the ambiguities that sit at the core of its source surprises. Its classiness gives way to a refreshingly messy, even tawdry honesty about the role of morality in memory."

David Kross's "and Winslet's intense performances and Daldry's deliberately placid control of tone make the material work as a love (and hate) story as well as a metaphor," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Tribeca has a filmmakers roundtable.

Updates, 12/11: "Both [Mark] Herman's The Boy with the Striped Pajamas and Daldry's The Reader feature ill-considered accents..., vanilla Europudding casts, and, oddly, both focus squarely on the effects of the Holocaust not on the Jews, but on the Germans." Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot: "And both have found homes stateside with the Weinstein Company, obviously making a play for year-end dominance with fare they've made their business stewarding. Luckily for Brit-nationalism, one could argue that both films, by the very character of their financing and production, efface their creators' origins (and imprints) almost entirely.... The problems of The Reader rest not so much in its execution... Rather, the film betrays a remarkable lack of intellectual sophistication."

"Daldry still can't admit to sensuality, yet he has the audacity to pretend a philosophical allegory," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "By the time The Reader lays on Jewish guilt ('Not that illiteracy is a very Jewish problem,' says Lena Olin as a wealthy Park Avenue Holocaust survivor) the calculation of sex, morbidity and piety becomes risible if not offensive."

"[T]hough The Reader costars the gifted Ralph Fiennes and gives a lot of screen time to a young actor named David Kross, it is Winslet's haunting performance that gives the film what success it has," argues Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/13: "The conventional Hollywood narrative always ends in the hero coming to some understanding of his own flaws. Uplift, you may say, is built into the contract," writes David Hare in the Guardian. "But Hanna, at the author's own insistence, reaches no real understanding of what she has done. You may even argue that no understanding of such extreme crimes is even possible. How, then, was anyone to embark on a movie in which one of the two principal characters essentially learns nothing?... It isn't possible in the course of a short article to get across just how tortured the path has been from reading the novel to finally sitting in front of a fresh-struck print of the film. All films are hard, but this one was harder than most and, as it turned out, crueller."

Kevin Kelly talks with Hare at the SpoutBlog.

"The Reader is not the first movie to portray a Nazi sympathetically, but it may be the first time a Nazi has been portrayed sympathetically without doing a single redeeming thing," writes Willa Paskin in Nextbook. "The line between understanding why someone does horrible things and absolving her for them is a fine one, but The Reader operates as if it doesn't exist. There is a difference between a reason and an excuse. It should go without saying, but apparently does not, that neither illiteracy nor blindly following orders is an excuse - or even a reason - for killing."

"Who would have thought a movie about a beautiful, frequently naked female Nazi could be so dull?" asks Dana Stevens in Slate. "Yes, Kate is grubbing for an Oscar this year with the near-simultaneous release of two Important Dramas (this and Revolutionary Road). But she may be the finest actress of her generation, and (unlike her only real competitor, the other Cate) she's also a five-time nominee who's never won. I say give her the gold guy already, Academy, if it means so much to her. Maybe it will free her up to stop acting in movies like this."

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2008 9:37 AM