Stephen Daldry

[Antoine Doinel]

It wouldn't be Oscar season, without some drama from Harvey Weinstein. While not much has been released about The Reader, the behind scenes drama of Weinstein versus producer Scott Rudin, and Kate Winslet's threats to drop out of any promotional campaigns have been deafening.

Anyway, it appears the dust has settled, a release date set and the first still has arrived.

[Matt]

Must not be any good if they're going ahead and releasing it this year.

[Antoine Doinel]

Scott Rudin takes his name off the film.

[Jeff]

trailer

[lacritfan]

Wow, I didn't know Kate plays a Nazi concentration camp guard in this.

Also I don't know what Charlie Finch looks like but after reading his comment I can't help but picture the priest from Harold and Maude.

[Antoine Doinel]

Huffington Post critic Thelma Adams says the film is a whole lot of child pornography.

[Grand Illusion]

It's certainly the least emotional movie somewhat about the Holocaust I've ever seen. It has some very interesting questions about rehabilitation. "Learning" is a central theme. Learning morality, learning law, and, most importantly, learning why one's past mistakes were indeed mistakes. By taking the most heinous of crimes, the film truly pushes the audience to examine their sense of who can be rehabilitated, after how long, and what is justice.

SpoilerShow

An excellent sequence has Ralph Fiennes questioning Kate Winslet's SS guard in prison, 20 years after she left Jewish 'prisoners' to burn in a church. Asked about her rehabilitation, she says that the dead are dead and questions if her personal life lessons even matter. When asked what she's learned, the formerly illiterate SS guard coldly replies that she's learned to read, implying this is all she has learned from prison.

This is mirrored later when Fiennes's character questions the lone survivor from the church burning incident. He asks, in a roundabout way, what she has learned. Her response is that there was nothing to learn from the camp. Her experiences were not therapy.

For most of its running time, The Reader is much colder than you might expect from a film with this subject matter, but there is intellectual depth here. The film questions guilt in unique ways, and for that, it's worthwhile. Winslet is stellar.

[lacritfan]

What a well acted, well made, odd movie. A film of illicit romance between a teenager and an older woman that results in a touching, romantic, memory-flooding gesture years later, intertwined with a film dealing with the national guilt of Germany for Nazism. Eee-yeah, no. Despite it's top notch pedigree - Winslet, Fiennes, Daldry & David Hare, Claire Simpson editing, Ann Roth costumes, Mirage (Sydney Pollack & Anthony Minghella) producing, it just doesn't work. The romance and all it's complexities just loses any relevance in the context of the Holocaust/national guilt. Kate's character isn't sympathetic enough for me to care what eventually happens to her and though it's supposed to be from the kid's perspective I don't understand why he still has feelings for her years later. A noble failure.

[John Cope]

Ron Rosenbaum's horrified reaction.

I still haven't seen this one yet but intend to as a friend I highly respect said it was his favorite by far of all the Hollywood holiday prestige pics. Maybe faint praise but incited my curiosity nonetheless.

[karmajuice]

It annoys me to no end when people take moral affront to Nazi Germans being portrayed as humans. That review was worthless. God forbid we have complex characters in an attempt to explore the reasons why this happened rather than dismissively damning them all and leaving it at that.

That said, this was an awful, soulless movie and the recent surge of Holocaust movies is ridiculous.

[knives]

But what of the oscars? Did you think of them?

[JonathanM]

It annoys me to no end when people take moral affront to Nazi Germans being portrayed as humans. That review was worthless. God forbid we have complex characters in an attempt to explore the reasons why this happened rather than dismissively damning them all and leaving it at that.

Completely agree with you.

Mostly, because I think Rosenbaum has it the wrong way round.

Not sure if you guys are big on blacking out spoilers, but in case you are I'll add them...

SpoilerShow

I think the film relies upon a piece of cinematic slight of hand. Most people seem to take the film to be about the suggestion that Winslett's character being illiterate somehow clears her of her guilt. To be fair, the film encourages this view by making Winslett's character sympathetic in an odd kind of way and by stressing so much on the fact that she learns to read.

However, I think that the real focus of the film is not upon Winslett's character, but upon her lover. I think the entire film revolves around the scene where the students come home from their field trip to the trials and they discuss what the point of the trials is and one of the students basically suggests that the professor should shoot himself along with everyone else who was around but did nothing to prevent the Holocaust.

This introduces the concept of collective guilt and the idea that even if you weren't in the SS or a Nazi, because you partook of the trappings of the Nazi state and the institutions that formed it, you are guilty because you gave Hitler tacit consent to do what he did.

The male character has a chance to get Winslett's character off by revealing that she can't read but he refuses to partly out of shame for having shagged a nazi and partly out of a desire to protect her shame. I don't think there's any question of his pardoning her or explaining away her actions. Instead he teaches her to read because HE feels guilty. He feels guilty for having had sex with her and simply because he's a German who, like the millions of Germans who did nothing but knew nothing about the death camps, benefited from the institutions of the german state such as the school buildings and the classes full of gorgeous aryan girls with pigtails.

I think the film is about the idea that Germans are, as a people, culpable (if not responsible) for the holocaust and how every single German has to come to terms with that cultural guilt. Winslett's character's lover does that by helping an idiotic illiterate woman to read. His act is symbollic, this is why he is so reticent to talk to her, write to her or even see her when she gets out of prison.

So far from excusing Germans from their part in the holocaust, I think the film actually takes a harder line than Rosenbaum in suggesting that even Germans born after the war have to atone for their action. Why else would that character be so happy at the Jewish woman's weird decision to keep a tin box?

So I thought the film was fundamentally dishonest, emotionally stunted and actually horrifically right wing.

[Jeff]

Looked fine to me, although maybe I'm just relieved this isn't a big screen Wicked adaptation (shudder).

Bad news, Murdoch. The news broke today that Stephen Daldry will be directing that very thing.

[knives]

Dear lord. Then again there is no way in heaven, earth, or even hell it could be worse than his last film.

[Murdoch]

I'll be happy when these revisionist fairy tales peter out and are replaced by some other obnoxious fad.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Dear lord. Then again there is no way in heaven, earth, or even hell it could be worse than his last film.

I say that after each Stephen Daldry film and he keeps proving me wrong.

[domino harvey]

He's just doing his part to repay witchcraft after all those Oscar spells he cast did their magic

[Brian C]

I liked Extremely Loud... considerably more than I liked The Reader.

[knives]

As a Jewish (used to be) New Yorker I'm not sure which one of those two to get offended more by.

[Brian C]

The Reader

[knives]

See, I think that one is the more obviously offensive given how demeaning to the tragedy which is a bigger tragedy than 9/11 it is, but I don't think it ever deliberately went into exploitation the same way of Extremely Close. That film seems to go out of its way to be as empty headed as possible and yet force specific reactions out of the audience using visual language that is still very close.

[George Kaplan]

Dear lord. Then again there is no way in heaven, earth, or even hell it could be worse than his last film.

I say that after each Stephen Daldry film and he keeps proving me wrong.

THE HOURS made me swear off of him with an almost religious finality. I can only imagine the horrors others have witnessed.

[Brian C]

See, I think that one is the more obviously offensive given how demeaning to the tragedy which is a bigger tragedy than 9/11 it is, but I don't think it ever deliberately went into exploitation the same way of Extremely Close. That film seems to go out of its way to be as empty headed as possible and yet force specific reactions out of the audience using visual language that is still very close.

Maybe so, but I seem alone in the world in that I found the kid in Extremely Loud to be a sympathetic figure, and the movie at least allowed him a human response to losing his dad. Can't say the same for The Reader, which had a personality zero at the center of its narrative, and which treated the Holocaust like some kind of remote historical abstraction.

(To be clear, I don't want to be perceived as saying that Extremely Loud is a good film, or that it's not problematic in ways you describe.)

[mfunk9786]

Is there any other director with a more puzzling run of Best Picture nominees?

[knives]

It's not really puzzling how he keeps getting nominated. He makes Academy catnip and tends to have big awards pushes.