Roger Ebert And The Reader

I was having lunch at work yesterday when I stumbled upon this blog post by Roger Ebert, which intentionally takes the most circuitous route possible to - perhaps - explain how it is that Mr. Ebert came to interpret The Reader in the way that he did. I thought his review of the film was excellent because it got the point that Hanna's secret - not the Holocaust, not the love affair, not the trial and her subsequent imprisonment - is the central subject of the story, and that all of the resulting details and events follow from it. Some might say that this minimizes the atrocities committed by Hanna, but I disagree; the gravity of those atrocities - with the understanding that they are atrocities that would not have been committed absent the secret that troubles Hanna's soul - illustrates the power of that secret and its effect on the whole of Hanna's life.

I sort of wish that I had had Mr. Ebert's blog post to read while considering my own review of The Reader, because most of the above paragraph would have served well a review of that film, with respect to the construction of the story, and I only touched on it obliquely when I wrote my review. Alas, though, Mr. Ebert's blog post was from this past Sunday, so could not have been read before I wrote about the movie. For some reason, I neither mentioned nor linked to Mr. Ebert's review of The Reader when I wrote my own review of the film. The link can be found here, and the review is excellent. At some point along the line, Roger Ebert ceased to be just a reviewer of films and instead became a combination film reviewer and film historian - and is, above all, a fine writer.