Stephen Daldry’s tight and trim adaptation of the Bernhard Schlink best-seller on German war guilt and the filial estrangement of the postwar generation. It begins in 1995 in the frigid colorless antiseptic Berlin apartment of Ralph Fiennes, lit by way of Vermeer, but soon it retreats to his adolescence in 1958, his incarnation in a very dissimilar young actor named David Kross, his scarlet fever, his torrid summer affair with an older streetcar attendant played by Kate Winslet, and his habit of reading to her in bed and bath: The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, The Lady with the Little Dog, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (“This is disgusting,” huffs the naked lady beside him). In school, his Lit. teacher broaches the universal theme of secrecy — a nudge to us viewers — and it’s clear that the boy’s secret is his older lover. But what’s hers? Again it’s clear, from the shaded and shifting emotions of the unfailingly fascinating Winslet, that there’s a lot going on inside which we don’t know about. And not because Winslet, as the torrid affair abundantly lays bare, is to any degree inhibited. It would not be giving away too much to reveal that several years later, when our protagonist has enrolled in law school, his advanced seminar attends for educational purposes a war-crimes trial in which his former lover is unmasked as an S.S. officer at Auschwitz. It’s still clear even then, from all the shading and shifting, that she harbors secrets. The provocation of the protagonist to divulge his own secret and to interpose himself in the proceedings becomes quite urgent and suspenseful, although in both courtroom and classroom the film has now entered a polemical mode that can only be termed uncinematic. All the same, David Hare, the screenwriter, is a fastidious wordsmith; and even if the film drags on a bit once the time line catches up to Ralph Fiennes, drags on seemingly to justify his place on the payroll, it eventually comes to a satisfying end in a highly charged sit-down between him and Lena Olin, a concentration-camp survivor. The clean clear color and the pinpoint focus (Chris Menges and Roger Deakins, co-credited as cinematographers) belie the moral muddiness. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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