The Reader

Throughout the first half of Stephan Daldry's The Reader, I couldn't figure why it's up for best picture until it hit me: it innocently and delicately establishes Hanna Schmitz's (Kate Winslet) and Michael Berg's (Ralph Fiennes, David Kross) affair before calmly and laconically bringing it to an end, all the while demonstrating the everlasting impression it's left on the elder Berg (who remembers the film in a series of extended flashbacks). Eventually, Schmitz is brought to trial for war crimes and Berg's law class must attend. As he watches her take the stand, his tender heart, full of pleasant and prominent memories of their fruitful time together, slowly and desperately bursts, as the extremely complicated nature of her trial's ethical/political dimension prevents him from presenting exonerating evidence. Afterwards, his guilt is extreme, and he expends an enormous amount of time doing what little he can to ease her life sentence.

The emotional impact is profound, suddenly pounding the audience with the affects of Berg's maturity and the crystallizing consequences of his insurmountable youthful passion, a recurrent moment of change, of becoming, solidified (thereby filmically capturing the passage from adolescence to adulthood, afterwards, the synchronous affects of an Event). He cannot overcome the lasting impression Hanna's ingenuous (yet naively brutal considering) soul has left upon his own and struggles with its agonizing influence for the rest of his days, love's torrentially tenacious (and eternal) nascence and mortality continually haunting his soul, a robust gentle diamond, shattered, constantly attempting its reconstitution. Nothing else really stood out from the film for me, similar to both The Deer Hunter and A Woman Under the Influence in form, a possible challenge to Slumdog Millionaire for best picture, unforgivably unforgettable.