Thumb through The Reader

In theaters Friday: Battle for Terra, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, X-Men Origins: Wolverine

New on DVD and Blu-ray: JCVD, The Uninvited

Kate Winslet pulls a wicked trick in The Reader, out now on DVD and Blu-ray. First impressions are often the strongest, but she managed to make me constantly rethink my characterization and judgment of her. The acclaimed actress, who rightfully won an Oscar for her portrayal as former SS security guard Hanna Schmitz in Stephen Daldry’s meditative adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s semi-autobiographical novel. We first meet her as a mystery. Caring, but oddly authoritative, she takes in a teenage boy she finds puking on the streets of post-war West Berlin from yellow fever. Early she is likable because her mysteries are intriguing. Caring, but oddly authoritative with fits of extreme defensiveness, Schmitz is in an unknown factor and a symbol for her city still searching for an identity after unspeakable horrors and ideological revolutions. Her life is one of secrets, those kept from the audience and those she keeps from everyone else in the film.

But one secret we are privy to is the illicit affair she begins with her Schmitz and her new teenage friend, the studious and lanky Michael Berg. This is not so much a kind of reverse Nightingale Syndrome as it is simply what a teenage boy would do when someone who looks like Kate Winslet gives him the full court press. But their relationship isn’t only sexual. Schmitz has Berg constantly read aloud passages from the books he’s assigned to in school. Her eyes light up like a first-time traveler as he shares from novel after novel.

But theirs is a summer affair, and one day, after neglecting friends his age for months, Berg arrives at Schmitz’s house to find her suddenly gone.

Years later as a law student, Berg attends a trial with his class, and there he is reintroduced to Schmitz. She is among a group of female guards accused of gross misconduct and murder during their stint at Auschwitz concentration camp. One of the survivors wrote a book about her harrowing experience, providing enough detail for the new government to track down and arrest her Nazi tormentors. Devastated, confused and almost betrayed by his own feelings, Berg must watch silently next to his professor as the woman he loved, or thought he did in some twisted way, faces judgment day.

But it’s when Berg realizes he could be the key to saving her, as obtuse as she may be, from life in prison that his moral conflicts explode. What does forgiveness really mean? Can mercy be earned? Can evil be as accidental a state as it is unfortunate? Heady stuff for a 22-year-old, and thankfully he had the middle-aged Berg to study as well. Ralph Fiennes plays the adult version, cold and emotionally distant, wrecked from years of torture over his relationship with Schmitz and her fate.

I won’t go into any spoilers here. Though languid at times, The Reader moves well to its own meter, particularly toward the end of Act 2 when Fiennes and Winslet connect in an unexpected way. Bolstered by patient and gorgeous images from cinematographer Roger Deakins, and a time-hopping script that doles out clues and characterization like breadcrumbs through a forest, it’s a quiet film with loud ideas. Winslet appeared on Ricky Gervais’ comedy series Extras two years ago, and in a satire piece on Hollywood success, Gervais told Winslet she wasn’t going to win an Oscar until she did a Holocaust movie. Well, here we are, and there somewhere among Winslet’s belongings is a bald golden guy. It is a quietly powerful performance for sure, at times sympathetic, but often shockingly foreign in her logic and demeanor. Thankfully the film itself adds something new to the WWII drama: a thorough, unapologetic examination of the never-ending aftermath.