Ralph Fiennes has a thankless role in "The Reader." It seems that all day, every day, Michael (Fiennes) is paralyzed with vivid memories of Hanna (Kate Winslet). She's naked, she's running a symbolically cleansing bath, she's naked again, then she's old (with typically bad makeup), and then she's dead. Kate Winslet has a thankless role, too--everyone does--because "The Reader" is a laughable bore.
During Hanna's trial, the stigma of illiteracy competes with the "stigma" of Nazism. Steps are made to excuse the bizarre juxtaposition, as when Hanna takes most of the blame for her actions and those of her fellow SS guards. It's still inexcusably nearsighted.
Like Hanna, every main player is shouldered with the burden of his/her respective society--a sure sign of a movie's overblown sense of importance.
We're asked to buy the fact that Michael happens to be in a law school seminar that attends Hanna's trial. That the trial hinges on a single written piece of evidence. That Hanna refuses to admit her illiteracy, even though it means life in prison instead of four years in prison. And, most unbelievably, that nobody in contact with Hanna has noticed that she can't even read a menu or write her own name. Thanks to the string-pulling score and Winslet's overacting, this fact is conveyed in the first few seconds of the first dramatic reading scene.
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