The Reader (2008)****

Seen on 26-8-2009 - In Kakatiya
--Cast: Kate Winslet (Hanna Schmitz), Michael Berg (Ralph Finnes)
--Dir. : Stephen Daldry
--Kate Winslet won 2009 Oscar for Best Actress
During the post-WWII trials of War criminals, Hanna Schmitz was accused of being responsible, as one of the guards, for the death of 300 Jews. Her argument in self-defense was that she was merely doing her duty as a guard which was to keep the Jews locked within the Church, but the judges hold her guilty for not opening the gates when the Church was set on fire (who set the Church on fire was not as important as that she allowed them to burn alive by keeping the gates locked). To establish her guilt the judges produce a report allegedly written by her. This was a crucial piece of evidence. And when they ask her to give a facsimile of her writing she, after a great deal of deliberation, refuses to write and merely admits to having written that report. Based on her admission she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Now, Michael Berg who was attending those trials as a law student was the only one who intimately knew Hanna Scmitz as a teenager and could have testified that she couldn't have written that report because she was illiterate; he knew this because he used to read to her stories and poems of writers like Chekov; she couldn't read those books herself. And, she used to show extraordinary sensitivity and emotional involvement during these readings (She used to say "first reading and sex afterward"). He could have testified that she as a person was warm and kind and took care of him even though he was a complete stranger. His testimony could have saved her from being harshly punished to life imprisonment; her sentence could have been commuted to a shorter period of incarceration. But he couldn't bring himself to testify in her defense because that would mean confessing publicly to his disgraceful affair with an elderly woman who is guilty of mass murder.
He suffers pangs of guilt (for not testifying) in the years that follow and in expiation he sends her, all through her prison years, a continual stream of his readings from writers and poets recorded on tapes. He helps her suffer her prison years less. And in the end he seems to purge himself of his guilt by confessing his shame to his young grown up daughter at the grave of Hanna Schmitz.
The film appears to be more about Michael Berg's guilt rather than that of Hanna Smitz. Viewed from this angle, the film appears to exculpate her of her complicity in holocaust. It would be interesting to know how the Jewish community had reacted to this movie. For such an exoneration of war criminals (who pleaded that they were only obeying orders in the holocaust) was held to be a sacrilege, a heresy. They must have come down heavily on such a defense of war criminals put forward by the film, just as they castigated Hannah Arendt's, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).