A National Public Radio commentator recently told his audience that he hoped The Reader will tank, at least in the awards sweepstakes. He was reacting to star Kate Winslet’s fliply ironic comment on an English radio program that appearing in a Holocaust film is a nearly sure-fire way to get honored by awards grantors.

I think this guy overreacted a bit. He said he’d had it with films purporting to address the Holocaust and what he regards as their abysmal, overblown failure. I am in sympathy with this sentiment; the subject is much beyond the capabilities of most filmmakers and, most of the time, the medium itself.

The Reader may be a case in point, at least in the form in which it has been transferred to the screen from Bernard Schlink’s novel. The film revolves around a retrospective recounting of the affair between Michael, a 15-year-old lad, and a train conductor (Winslet) named Hannah in the German town of Neustadt in the late 1950s. The boy (a terrific, uncannily controlled youngster of the same age as his character, David Kross) is stricken and, it develops, emotionally stunted for life, when she abruptly disappears.

Years later, while he’s studying law, he chances on her trial for war crimes committed when she was an S.S. concentration camp guard. She had him read to her whenever he visited her, before they made love, and it comes to him in an epiphany that she’s illiterate, an undisclosed fact that becomes crucial in her trial.

Part of the problem is the literal nature of film. Schlink’s writing was tersely to the point, barely emphasized for the most part despite the difficulty inherent in the material. Many will find the film treatment distasteful. Director Steven Daldry (The Hours) and writer David Hare’s extensive depiction of the physical nature of the affair is, in itself, redolent of the old erotic convention of the older woman and the youth craving initiation. There’s a soft porn lubricity which may have been intended to convey what it is that Michael feels he has lost.

The other problematic aspect is the attempt to humanize Hannah and to suggest the possibility of redemption. The movie never really makes a case for this because Hannah mostly remains a device, lifted from a novel, and not a real person. Her illiteracy comes off as some kind of metaphor. The Reader is really more concerned with Michael’s suffering—particularly when the role is picked up in the last third of the film by a soul-shriveled Ralph Fiennes as the middle-aged lawyer the youngster becomes.

Winslet is unlikely to get those honors she mordantly spoke of. Neither she nor the film grapple successfully with the difficulties posed by this material.

—george sax