Bootleg: The Reader (Daldry, 2008)

While this is the best of any of the Academy’s ‘Best Picture’ nominees that I have seen so far (until now, I’ve also seen Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), it still leaves a lot to be desired. The first third of the film is drastically different than the concluding hour and fifteen minutes. I thought a lot about Breillat’s Brief Crossing during this first act, a film that addresses an older woman’s interest and sexual encounter with a minor with more depth, grace, and maturity than anything that culminates in Daldry’s film. While Breillat builds her film and her characters’ relationship slowly and believably, Kate Winslet’s Hanna is fucking Michael for days before they even know each other’s names. Their relationship is not only rushed, but it seems to be unmotivated, too. Obviously Michael’s participation makes sense because he is a teenage virgin, and of course he’s horny, but Winslet is bitchy and cold toward Michael, and their isn’t any sense of attraction between the two before they are going at it all day every day. If this had evolved throughout the film, it could have led to something sexually revelatory for a Hollywood film. Instead, their relationship is dropped and never returned to. In fact, given the treatment of their relationship during the rest of the film, you could replace that first act with one in which Hanna is Michael’s nanny, with Michael reading to her while she does her chores, and the final two acts of the film, left alone, would have made just as much sense and gotten the same emotional response from me.

Winslet is mediocre in her role, as is Fiennes as older Michael; the only exception is David Kross as young Michael, who is good. Winslet somehow felt like she was doing a Streep impersonation in this, even though I cannot think of any particular film that Streep acts like this. I’m probably just projecting my assumptions of how Kate perceives her own acting skills onto her, but, either way, she is just as undeserving of awards recognition in her role here as she is in Revolutionary Road. She ages so unbelievably that its embarrassing, and her German accent was just as bad as Jeff Goldblum’s in the putrid Adam Resurrected. Fiennes is lost and bored (and boring) as the older Michael, and his conversation with a victim from Hanna’s Nazi camp toward the end of the film is one of the worst acted scenes in movies last year. The entire Holocaust twist on this film felt contrived given that it’s not mentioned or developed at all in the first act of the film, and I’m sure it’s the only reason the film got funded, since everyone in Hollywood loves honoring Holocaust victims, at least every other year. This film was too long, mildly interesting, and melodramatic; its message, ‘Learn how to read when you’re young so that your life doesn’t suck,’ was lame. The potential it had in its first 45 minutes, though, makes it better than Slumdog, and it’s lack of plagiarism makes it better than Benjamin Button.