What do you do when you can't allow yourself to open up emotionally, but you have so much to offer another person? Physically, mentally, emotionally. What do you do when a secret or a truth gets in your way of having an honest relationship with each other? You go through a whole summer of lovemaking and reading stories, you fall in love, you lie, then you leave. But the pain you feel inside isn't the extent of it, you've left another person, someone so attached to you, broken. It makes the viewers think, wonder, ponder, on what THEY think love is. What is love? Is it when things get to be too much, you fall too hard, you want to tell them everything, to be a better person for them? Or is it when you know you can't be what they think you are and then you leave because of it?
The Reader, starring Kate Winslet and David Kross. Hanna Schmitz (Winslet) found a young Michael Berg (Kross) in the alley near her apartment, ill. She cleans him up and takes him home. Three months later, after the Scarlet Fever has left, Michael goes to find Hanna and say "thank you" for her kind help. Hanna is twice Michaels age, but soon the two find a common ground. Michael helped Hanna bring in coal for her shower, mean while getting coal dust all over himself. This is the beginning of a relationship so deep and passionate, yet so secretive and impossible that they could only fall in love with each other. Michael brings his books home from school and begins reading to Hanna; she loves it and their physical relationship deepens.
It isn't until Hanna leaves him, suddenly, that he begins to see the truth. 8 years later, as a law student in college, he sees the woman he used to love on trial. The Nazi trials. Enter post-war Germany, where Hanna sits guilty of a crime she didn't fully commit. And Michael knows the reason she isn't to blame. A secret she kept from him, a love they both shared, a moment in time they will never forget. Take a journey to The Reader and see what happens to two people when they, unlikely, come together for a journey that will follow them for over 30 years.
The Reader, for me, was so intense and so riveting that I couldn't help but love it. The acting in this film was BRILLIANT. So spectacular. DO NOT watch this movie with children, however. There is a lot of nudity due to the artistic nature of the movie.
Michael: I'm not frightened. I'm not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.
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