What Would You Have Done?

For me, a film is successful when it leaves its viewers still thinking and talking about it the next day. Of course, this is a general statement; I am sure there are many really bad films that spark conversation for days on end. The Reader grabs the mind as it works its way through the story and leaves viewers asking one another questions about moral conscience and what any of us might have done when ordered to send people to their death during Nazi pogroms. Many of us have had these thoughts before, but the plot in The Reader, which is based on a German novel(Der Vorleser), by Bernhard Schlink, employs an unpredictable storyline of a middle-aged woman (Hanna, played by Golden Globe winner Kate Winslet) who, in 1958, takes up with a boy of 15(Michael) whom she forces to read classic works to her ( Homer, Chekov, Dickens); his payoff is great sex. The clandestine affair lasts only a summer, but the boy encounters his backstreet romance several years later when he and other law students attend a trial of former SS guards who locked 300 Jews in a church that caught afire from bombs. The prime defendant is the former sex-reading partner, and the young law student watches in anguish and struggles with his conscience as he considers but decides not to reveala secret about the former guard that might have some bearing on the case. The young man, whose older self is played by Ralph Fiennes, struggles with what he did or did not do through his life, though some emotional healing is suggested.

As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioneers: Ordinary Germany and the Holocaust argues, the Holocaust was enabled by cultural collaboration with roots extending back centuries. In the Reader, we see the faces of female guards whose faces were recognized by survivors and who then become the face of evil for a guilty country, but many unnamed, faceless people were complicit in what happened. As one of the law students says, "everyone knew about it." This reality complicates the guilt of Winslet's character, but it doesn't make her innocent. She asks the judge, "What would you have done?", albeit in a manner of a someone asking about issuing a parking ticket rather than someone wrestling with leading 300 people to their deaths. The movie is satisfying, but not because it supplies any answers; it satisfies because it respects how difficult it is to truly understand how humans conceived, implemented, and enabled the Holocaust.