Triumph of the will...or its denial?

March 26, 9:38 PMPhiladelphia Movie ExaminerWilliam Sternman

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Whenever I see a clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935), I have very mixed emotions. Of course, as a Jew—and a human being—I despise everything that Hitler and his gang of sociopaths stood for.

And yet….

And yet I can’t help wondering: what if I weren’t a Jew, what if I were old enough and what if I were at that rally in Nuremberg, what would I have felt? Could I have resisted the exhilarating empowerment of being a member of the “master race”? Would I have had any scruples about using my power to settle old scores and giving those Jews the punishment they had earned?

I would like to think that I would. But I’m not so sure.

I experienced the same conflicts watching The Reader (2008). In it a concentration guard is given a cruel choice. She is guarding a group of 300 Jews locked in a church when Allied bombs hit the church and set it on fire. She wants to unlock the doors and set them free, but if she does, she herself will be killed. She decides to save herself.

Again, what would I have done if I were her? Would I have sacrificed my own life to do the right thing? Again, I would like to think I would, but in this case I have a feeling I wouldn’t.

Director Stephen Daldry’s movie (adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s novel by David Hare) doesn’t start out to be a morality play. In fact, for the first half it’s a sweet story of fifteen-year-old Michael Berg’s introduction to sex by Hanna, an uneducated older woman in 1958 Berlin. He falls in love with her, of course, and is able to repay her, in a way, by reading to her from his school books (The Odyssey, The Lady with the Dog and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).

Then, without warning, without even a farewell note, she disappears and Michael is heartbroken.

Then it’s 1966, and Michael, now a law student, is observing a trial of former SS guards when he realizes that one of them is his lost love. It’s easy for me to sit back in darkness of a theater and make moral judgments about the choices he makes, but would I have acted any better? Once again, I have a feeling I wouldn’t. We can only do what we can at the time, not what, in retrospect, we wish we had done .

The movie ends with another moral conflict for me. The adult Michael tries to make amends to a Jewish concentration camp inmate by donating money from his lover to any charity she chooses. She is cold and unfeeling beyond comprehension. I hated her treating him so heartlessly. But, as before, I find myself wondering how generous I would have been if I (and my mother) had been at Auschwitz and was now being offered conscious salve from our former tormentor. I realized that I hated the woman because I saw in her my own inability to forgive. What would I have done her place? Obviously, exactly what she did.

Kate Winslet won a well-deserved Academy Award for her performance as Hanna. Michael is played very appealingly as a boy by David Kross and rather effetely by Ralph Fiennes as an adult. As the intransigent Jewish survivor, Lena Olin reaches for the truth of her character without pleading for our sympathy or understanding.

You have to take quite a bit of The Reader on faith. The motivations of the characters often don’t make sense. The change in tone, from light romance to historic horror, can be disconcerting. It almost feels like you’re watching two different movies barely held together by one continuing character. That’s Hanna; unfortunately, as played by Kross and then Fiennes, Michael seems to be two different people.

The feel-good coda feels tacked on and doesn’t evolve out of the main story, It ties up the movie in a sentimental ribbon so that we don’t have to think about what we’ve just seen. And it lets us off the hook without having to resolve any of the moral conflicts that the story stirred up in us.

You watch the trailer here.