Its win for Best Actress aside, The Reader will most likely be remembered as That Holocaust Film With Kate Winslet. But it’s really a story about the power of shame, one that’s well-acted and impeccably shot and yet lacking in any real kind of emotional warmth.

Based on a book by Bernhard Schlink, it starts off in 1995 and follows the thoughts of a lawyer (Ralph Fiennes) back to when he was a teen (David Kross) in post-war Berlin in 1945 and having an affair with an older woman (Winslet) whom we later learn was a guard at Auschwitz during the war.

The whole thing is a somber affair, including the sex scenes, which feature full-frontal nudity from both Winslet and Kross, though it at least never sinks to the depths of despair reached by director Stephen Daldry’s The Hours. This despite the presence of Fiennes, who gives a nice, sensitive performance as the kind of emotionally repressed male that, presently, seems to be his specialty.

For me the film was not bad up to the start of Winslet being tried for war crimes, but it became a lot more compelling after we (and Kross) learn that Winslet’s character has lived with a certain disability that could save her from even more misery and she instead sacrifices her freedom rather than reveal it to the world.

I think Winslet does a great job here, especially in how she turns her working-class character from hard-headed and hearted in the beginning to deferential and scared and confused later on. Watch her admit to the tribunal that she honestly doesn’t understand how letting prisoners burn in a church is a problem. You realize she really doesn’t know any better, even decades later, under tons of old-age makeup (the real reason Winslet won an Oscar). It’s heartbreaking.

Daldry’s direction is pleasingly unfussy and he keeps the film’s pace unhurried, but not slow. There are some beautiful images here, too, like a hand on a barb wire fence, and the scene where Kross walks silently through the empty Auschwitz cabins has power. The mostly piano score by Nico Muhly is simple and doesn’t interfere and, thanks to Hours screenwriter David Hare, events are easy to follow.

Yet in the end, while I liked the film well enough, I didn’t love it. It needed more emotional fire in its belly. I mean, sure, it’s a classy production with top-tier acting and a Brit reciting passages from “The Odyssey” and it looks very professional. But it’s a little too dry. Maybe Fiennes should have sworn every other word, like he did in In Bruges. Now there’s a fun movie. – [DVD]

Drama/Romance

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 4/14/09

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