Column:

Sometimes over-the-top 'Reader' is a winner

After the first 45 minutes, it gets good.

By Patrick Daugherty

Published Feb. 26, 2009

Since its release late last year and up to its win for Kate Winslet as Best Actress at the Oscars on Sunday, you might have heard some not-so-nice things about "The Reader."

It has been derived as nothing but shameless Oscar bait and the worst kind of Hollywood indulgence.

There is certainly some credence to these claims, and in many ways, "The Reader" is a throwback to the big-budget independent movies Miramax made ubiquitous in the '90s.

A period piece that weaves back and forth between two different eras that stars Winslet and Ralph Fienees while still also managing to revolve around the Holocaust? This would have been one of last decade's most acclaimed films.

But this is not the '90s, and movies that so shamelessly pander to the Academy don't usually fare so well anymore. Minimalism has been back in vogue for Hollywood's prestige pictures for nearly 10 years now.

At first it appears everyone's worst fears about "The Reader" are true. We are shown Fiennes whimsically staring out his window at a train from his high rent Berlin apartment before we are seamlessly transitioned back in time to him riding on the same train in the 1950s. Cue puke here.

Then seemingly out of nowhere, we are then taken on a whirlwind romance as he begins an affair with a ticket taker twice his age from the same train, Kate Winslet.

The film's first 45 minutes, focused completely on the relationship between Winslet and Fiennes' 15-year-old younger self (David Kross), is as predicted, one the most cringe-inducing stretches in modern cinema.

We are treated to endless sex and showering, along with at least 10 scenes of Kross reading to Winslet and Winslet inexplicably referring to him as "kid," as if she were the German John Wayne.

But then, shockingly, "The Reader" embarks on a morally ambiguous and devastating journey that earns every bit of that Best Picture nomination.

You see, Winslet isn't just any random ticket taker -- she's also an ex-SS concentration camp guard.

It is not until later, when for a class at his law school Kross must attend the war crimes trial of ex-SS guards, and long after their affair has ended, that he (and we) discovers the truth.

What ensues is a truly heartbreaking and meticulous examination of what it was like to be a German in post-Nazi Germany, including a former Nazi in post-Nazi Germany, and one of the better ruminations on the madness of Nazism ever released.

And by dealing with the Holocaust's horrible aftermath rather than its horrible perpetration, "The Reader" differentiates itself from the myriad of Holocaust horror stories that have come before it.

While the big twist is a rather bizarre one -- let's just say it's more "Sesame Street" than "Schindler's List" -- and Winslet's performance is not the revelation we have been led to believe, "The Reader" ultimately passes muster and adds itself to the pantheon of essential Holocaust films, no small feat for a maligned, focus-grouped Oscar grubber.