The film has small cinematic resource. It is as expert a product as it is trite in its framing, playing and pseudo-fucking. There is a single slightly subtle moment, when the boy Michael is seen arranging his stamp collection, among which are ranged some swastika'ed values from the Führer's days. Daldry, when subserviently interviewed by press puffers, found comradely time to praise Sir David's script, which is markedly lacking in wit (the film entirely lacks laughs, which would puncture its whole pseudo-seriousness). Daldry picked out the final scene, for which (unusually in Hare's dogged loyalty to the text) there is no precedent in the novel. Here Sir David is licensed to display all his insightful originality, what there is of it.
The scene takes place in a camp survivor's New York apartment. She is now a comely and elegant not-so-young woman. Michael, montonously impersonated by Fiennes, calls on her for some sad reason, seeking "closure" perhaps, and finds her in such luxurious circumstances that we are incited more to envy than to pity her (the reverse of what we are rigged to feel about Hanna).
In the course of award-winning dialogue about "the camps", the vigilant cinéaste might note a slightly out-of-focus modern abstract sculpture, just lumpy enough to deserve a Sight and Sound footnote about the sly intrusion of an image of the Golden Calf, a common centre of worship, no doubt, for lucky survivors. To make a solemn point, as spuriously moral as everything we have seen so far, Fiennes ends by asking the lady about what (presumably what moral or uplifting thought) "came out of the camps".
This allows her to reply: "Nothing came out of the camps." At which he departs, closure not quite achieved, since history's biggest cracker has been said, by One Who Ought to Know, to contain no redemptive motto. Nothing came out of the camps? Yes, it did, though: the recipe for the kind of porno-kitsch to which Schlink's (and Daldry's and David Hare's) The Reader add their po-faced mite. Turn it over and you will see that it is stamped Boffo on the obverse side. Saul Friedländer's Kitsche and Death is a primer of the kind of "art" that death-worship excited. Part of the vast compendium of verbiage and images that came out of the camps (Luchino Visconti's The Damned is as camp as a maestro can hope to get) includes the kind of aromatic porno-pomposity of which Schlink's novel and Daldry and Sir David's catchpenny confection are well-sugared, award-winning, thought-provoking, barefaced and bare-arsed instances. The final twist in this tale is that, since Winslet, Daldry and Hare are all British candidates for the Oscar, it has become arguably unpatriotic not to applaud their enterprise. Sometimes only Ahasuerus is licensed to speak without fear or hope of favour.
