Brightest Young Things

"The Reader", Kate Winslet's other movie during Oscar bait season is a carefree, life and love affirming romp. NOT.

In fact, while I decided to see this instead of "Revolutionary Road" this weekend (hoping, maybe stupidly, that at least this would be something I could detach myself from) I can safely say the movie we are about to talk about is probably the most devastating, heart wrenching movie I've seen all year. Which is saying something because me and heart wrenching movies go together like....like peanut butter and avocado: unexpectedly well.
And it is not so devastating because it deals with (among other things) Holocaust, but because it genuinely does touch upon all those topics we cannot help but identify with on some level: love and youth lost, idealisms shattered, and that one person you will just never forget.

The story in brief is this: When Michael Berg was 15 years old and living in 1950s West Germany (you do the math when he was born), he caught Scarlett Fever. He spent several months in bed and then when he was better, he went to take flowers to the woman who helped him the day he was feeling ill. Her name was Hanna Schmitz. Somehow in a turn of events that can only awkwardly happen to awkward teen boys in the hands of older women, he ends up in her bed and they embark on an affair that would last for one summer.
He is 16 (and played rather teriffically by David Kross), she is 38 (and brought to stern but vulnerable life by Kate Winslet, all dewy skin, soft limbs and blonde hair all over glistening in West German sun).
They have sex (later maybe even, gasp, make love), take long baths and ride bycicles across countryside and she asks him to read to her. Constantly. Which he does.
And then...Then one day she disappears.
Years go by and Michael, still carrying a torch of that long lost flame, is now a law student and all the pretty law student girls love him but he never forgot Hanna. And so one day on a day trip to war crimes court he sees her as one of the six guards accused of murder of hundreds of Jews in concentration camps they worked at. She stands there and does not deny it. He cries and the trial continues and ends revealing facts both horrifying and endearing about the woman he once loved even though he did not know who she was.

The rest I'll let you see for yourself but let me just say this: it is not the love affair, or even the trial or the mass destruction or even the rather sad if predictable ending that make you cry in this movie.

What makes you cry is this: There, somewhere 3/4s in, is a 5 minute segment in which a package arrives, and a package is opened and the things in that package are revealed to be what you hoped or feared they would be and the reaction they provoke in the eyes of the receiver are probably the most heartbreaking 5 minutes committed to celluloid of late.
Not an eye dry in the house. Trust me.

One could talk about this movie as a vehicle to explore the inevitable impact of growing up in post war Germany on young people still finding their own identities, or as a way to look at the horrible crimes of WWII or the frailty of law and morality in general.

One could do all those things. Those themes are abundant and well presented (Ralph Fiennes as the adult Michael plays tortured as only Ralph Fiennes could, and Stephen Daldry who directed it proved his hand with both adolecents and women in "Billy Eliott" and "Hours" respectively) but it really the depiction of the inextricable bond you will always feel for the first person you ever truly loved, no matter how briefly, that makes this movie, for me at least, as great as I do think it is.

Go see it.
If you need me, I will be here crying into my pie.