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The Reader directed by Stephen Daldry

Melinda Sue Gordon © the Weinstein Company

I was much more impressed by this film than I'd expected. I read the Bernhard Schlink novel when it came out about twelve years or so ago, and enjoyed it very much; but it was one of those novels you love and admire during the reading but which makes you feel slightly let down in retrospect. As a teenager in late 1950s Berlin Michael meets a mysterious, much older woman, the tram conductress Hanna Schmitz, who introduces him to sex and who loves Michael to read to her – and in this way, great works of literature become one of the foundations of their erotic and romantic affair.

Kate Winslet has won an award for this, and been nominated for an Oscar, and I'm not surprised: this is a good performance, better than Angelina Jolie's in Changeling, for example, a much more obviously Oscar-aspirant role. The shame is that she won the Golden Globe for best supporting actress – presumably to give her a shot at an award in two films, this and Revolutionary Road - when the truth is she has the female lead here. I'm quite happy with Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael, too: he gives the part the post-holocaust earnestness and solemnity that it needs. But the standout performance is from David Kross as the young Michael, who makes this a true coming-of-age story and who I think does full justice to the sentimental and moral threads of the story.

And a moral thread it certainly has. Michael studies law in Heidelberg in the sixties and attends the trial of a group of women accused of crimes against humanity: as SS guards during one of the notorious “death marches” at the end of the war they allowed Jews to die rather than intervene to save them – which would have involved risking letting them go free. Hanna is among them. Michael comes to understand why Hanna joined the SS and the nature of her moral or amoral evasion; and, in time, devotes himself to her literal and moral literacy.

What let me down about the Schlink novel was the feeling that the sustained metaphor of illiteracy – Hanna's inability to read has a plot function in that it motivates her abandoning happiness and decency, but also has an obvious symbolic import – was somehow too trite and obvious, too schematic to really satisfy in a fully sophisticated, adult way. This is what makes me feel the film is in a way an improvement on the novel, because the fact that we see and hear Michael reading, in person and on tape, the fact that we see the books he loves and the tapes he labels up for Hanna, the fact that we see her early efforts at writing – all this makes the metaphor more dramatic, more real somehow, than it seemed on the page where perhaps the use of books seemed too cleverly intertextual. I found this aspect of the story more moving, and sadder, than I remember in the novel.

There are other things to like, too. I loved Nico Muhly's (admittedly quite conventionally cinematic) music, and the look of the film is fabulous – almost grainy at times in its bringing the Germany of the fifties and sixties to life – so Stephen Daldry's direction succeeds with both the actors and the cinematography at any rate. Where the film took place looked and felt like Germany (which isn't as easy as it sounds: there are movies filmed on location which don't achieve this, like Woody Allen's awful Match Point which made London feel like a film set for rich people), and each period felt convincing, too – I really felt I was inside each time, and there. Again, I'm driven to a comparison with Changeling, which staked so much on décor and costumes but achieved nothing like this recreation of the past.

My one disappointment was Hanna's great challenge to the judge: what would you have done? She asks him. The Reader is about the relationship between the wartime generation of Germans and their children, the children of the post-war Stunde Null. Michael can't help loving Hanna, in spite of what she has done, and what he thinks of it, and he is committed to her, whether he wants to be or not and beyond his inability to understand. Hanna's question speaks for her entire generation and says to us: condemnation is not enough. An attempt to come to terms with or deal with the Nazi horror -  sich damit auseinandersetzen, as Germans say – must involve not only a moral criticism of what the wartime Germans did, but an honest confrontation of whether we, or anyone else, would act better in that situation, and what they should have done. It's a great dramatic moment, potentially, handled well in the novel but it's somehow underpowered here. A pity, because this is an important matter to draw to the attention especially of the English-speaking world, where too many people have absorbed factoids like Hitler was elected and under the indirect influence of Daniel Goldhagen seem to feel that Nazi Germany was a society much like our own, where resistance was an easily available choice.

So much else is strong about this film, though: I recommend it.