The Reader (2008) Review: Love Is Apparently Not Very Logical

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I wrote about before, there was this idea that some people simply aren’t meant to stay together for their whole lives. For whatever reason, they meet at one particular point, cross paths, and then go their separate ways. To make that idea work, Benjamin Button needed three hours of fantasy melodrama. The Reader, thankfully, doesn’t need nearly that much fuss to say something pretty similar. Because really, where else are a lonely woman approaching 40 and a 15-year-old boy supposed to find someone to satisfy their intimate needs if not in each other’s arms? Especially in the 1950s. Society obviously wouldn’t approve, but I have a feeling the police wouldn’t be knocking on the door either. And what are the chances that this little intersection in their lives will turn into some long-lasting shared path? Well… probably not great. While you’re still wondering whether this whole thing is supposed to be about love or just good old-fashioned sexual attraction, the movie suddenly takes a couple of turns. And those are best discussed without spoilers, because, surprisingly, The Reader actually has some pretty damn effective twists. Which is not something I necessarily expected from an Oscar-y historical drama. And the interesting thing is that the twists don’t just move the plot along. They completely change what the movie is about. Suddenly you’re no longer just watching a complicated relationship between two people. You’re watching a movie about guilt, responsibility, morality, law, shame, and the uncomfortable question of whether understanding someone means having to forgive them.

So… what do you do with someone you love?

What happens when you discover that someone you once loved — and maybe still love — has done something absolutely horrible? Do you try to justify them? Do you try to understand why they did it? Do you decide that whatever feelings you had for them are no longer relevant? There isn’t really a “correct” answer here, which is probably the point. Love is a weird thing. It doesn’t suddenly disappear because you’ve discovered something terrible about a person. Unfortunately, emotions don’t seem to care much about logic, morality or common sense. And then the movie gets even more uncomfortable by asking where people like this actually come from. Where do the “good organizers” come from? The people who follow instructions perfectly, don’t ask questions and just do what they’re told? Does a system create them? Does it basically train people from childhood not to think critically, replace empathy with rules and make obedience into a virtue? Or are some people simply like that naturally and just happen to find a system that gives them the perfect environment to use those traits? Maybe for some people, following rules is basically a religion. Maybe they genuinely don’t have the intellectual ability to look at a situation from several different angles. Or maybe they could think differently, but simply never learned how. And, more importantly, can someone like that ever overcome their own limitations? Can you actually rise above yourself?

“It’s just my job”

The really strange thing is that the same qualities that can make someone useful — being extremely disciplined, honest, consistent and obedient — can make them successful inside a completely fucked-up system. But then you take that same person and put them into normal society, and suddenly those qualities don’t work nearly as well. There is something almost tragic about being perfectly suited to one system and completely unsuited to another. It also reminded me, weirdly enough, of Andy Dufresne. Not because the characters are particularly similar, but because there is this idea of someone being punished partly because they refuse to behave in the way everyone expects them to. Someone who speaks clearly, says what they actually think, doesn’t perform emotions for other people and doesn’t bother with unnecessary social games isn’t necessarily going to be perceived as trustworthy or sympathetic. “Be more cunning,” my mother used to tell me. And she was absolutely right. People generally want to see what they want to see. They don’t necessarily want your honest, carefully considered, internally consistent truth. Sometimes you need to package it differently.

Law vs. morality

At one point, a grey-haired professor tells his students something along the lines of: we’re not discussing what is right, we’re discussing what is legal. And then the movie basically spends the rest of its time showing us how difficult it is to actually separate those two things. Personal feelings get in the way. Personal hatred gets in the way. Personal sympathy gets in the way. People can become so emotionally involved in something that they stop looking at the actual evidence and start looking for the answer they already decided was correct. Can you really put your emotions aside when something personally disgusts you? In theory, yes. In practice… I’m not so sure. Ironically, maybe the only person who can genuinely do it is someone who is emotionally and intellectually limited enough not to get distracted by all the complicated moral layers everyone else sees. Which is a pretty uncomfortable thought.

And then there is the next generation

The professor also makes another important point: every generation of children is supposed to reconsider the mistakes of the generation before it. Otherwise, what’s the point? Obviously, that doesn’t mean the younger generation will automatically come up with the perfect answer. They probably won’t. They might even make completely different mistakes. But that’s still better than blindly repeating the previous ones. And honestly, anyone who likes saying “it’s just my job” should probably occasionally stop and think about what that actually means. You have a brain. You have consciousness. You are capable of looking beyond the immediate task and asking what your actions are actually contributing to. And even if “it’s just my job” isn’t being used to justify something truly horrific, it still isn’t a magical phrase that absolves you of responsibility for everything you do.

Kate Winslet

Obviously, Kate Winslet is the biggest star here. And she is really good. Her character goes through several completely different phases, and Winslet manages to make them all feel like the same person. She looks absolutely exhausted and worn down for most of the movie. I genuinely don’t know whether they put a ton of makeup on her or simply didn’t put much makeup on her at all, but either way, this woman looks nothing like the young woman from Titanic. The commanding personality, the strange tenderness she has toward reading, the way books become a way to escape into some imaginary world and get away from her own miserable life — all of that works really well. Her external behavior and internal conflicts are also communicated without constantly having to spell everything out. Although I do have one question. What exactly did this 15-year-old boy see in her? Because, to me, everything about her — the way she behaves, the way she looks, the whole exhausted and emotionally closed-off thing — is almost aggressively unsexy. Yes, yes, teenage hormones. I get it. Still. At some point I just wanted to raise my hands to the heavens and ask Freud to come down here and explain this weird Oedipal situation to me because apparently I’m too stupid to understand it.

Final verdict

Whether you’ll like The Reader probably depends a lot on what you expect going in. Especially whether you already know about the main twist. For me, it worked much better because I knew basically nothing. I hadn’t read the synopsis, and I definitely wasn’t expecting a major plot twist from what looked like a fairly standard serious historical Oscar drama. So I basically got three things for the price of one:

• a surprisingly engaging story;
• a complicated relationship drama;
• and a whole collection of moral and ethical questions with absolutely no convenient answers. And honestly, that combination worked for me. It’s not exactly a cheerful movie, obviously. But it is one of those films that gives you something to argue with after the credits, which is usually a good sign.