You could call Stephen Daldry and David Hare's adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's partly autobiographical novel about German guilt and the Nazi past worthily and sensitively managed, considering the innate difficulties of translating it to the screen. Or you could object to it as morally ambiguous, in that it regards even collaborators in Nazi crimes as human, and toe-curlingly ponderous in places.

Both views are valid. But what no one can deny are the strong performances that Daldry secured from Kate Winslet, David Kross and Ralph Fiennes.

It would not be surprising if Winslet in particular were to win a Golden Globe, even an Oscar, for her portrait of a former concentration camp guard at Auschwitz who provides an introduction to sex and love for an innocent 15-year-old (Kross plays the boy and Fiennes the adult he becomes).

Winslet is an actress who gets better with age, as we shall see again in the forthcoming Revolutionary Road, directed by her husband, Sam Mendes.

Delights in him reading

In The Reader we are introduced to her Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor, who takes pity on the young Michael Berg when he falls ill in the street near where she lives. When he brings flowers to thank her after recovering from scarlet fever she seduces him.

It is her first sex for years. It is his first ever, and he is deeply affected. Their sexual encounters continue and there's a reason why she delights in him reading to her from the classics after each one, and a reason, too, why she finally ups and leaves him. The first reason I will not divulge, since the film cleverly does not do so for some time.

The second is her Nazi past, which she has put to the back of her mind and which the affair somehow pushes forward again.

All this takes place in 1958. The next time we see her is in 1966, as one of the accused in a courtroom trying to decide the complicity of her and others in the horrors of the Holocaust. In the gallery watching her, by chance, is her former young lover, now a law student come to witness an important case, shocked beyond measure and in possession of a secret which will save her from the judge's ire should he divulge it.

Entwined, sometimes rather awkwardly, with this are scenes of the youth as a middle-aged lawyer years later, now an introspective and inward-looking man, divorced, unable to make proper contact with his grown daughter and still obsessed by a dangerous love for the woman who gave him his first taste of real life.

We see the adult before we see the boy and end with the adult, too. It is a role tailor-made for Fiennes. But you sometimes get the feeling that the boy and the man are two different people, struggling to make sense of things in two different films. They are linked best by the fact of the film's title and the efforts the grown man makes to continue the readings that the woman always loved when he was young.

Rewarding parts

Winslet and Kross have fundamentally more rewarding parts, or at least in the more convincing three-quarters of the film. Winslet's role cannot have been easy since she has to encompass an amorously inclined seductress, a stiff and seemingly uncomprehending prisoner in the dock who considers she would have been failing in her duty if she had done the right thing, and, years later, an elderly convicted woman who knows that you can never bring back the dead.

She is totally convincing throughout, as is Kross playing a teenager whose innocence is upended first by his affair and then by the shock of discovering that the woman he can't get out of his mind was once a monster.

The film is beautifully shot (by veteran cinematographers Roger Deakins and Chris Menges), pays great attention to its performances (Bruno Ganz and Lena Olin have particularly good cameos) and wraps itself around its convoluted storyline with considerable skill.

There is a certain sense, perhaps, that it is going for the glory of award recognition. It is possibly too polished on occasion. But Winslet's intricate performance and Daldry's skills of persuasion make it a worthy memorial to its producers, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, the values of whose own films it faithfully replicates.

The Reader is released in the UAE on Thursday.

By Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard

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