Last night I went to see The Reader with my good pal M
I knew it would be great
I mean Kate winslet and Ralph fiennes how can you go wrong?
Not only have I adored Kate since heavenly creatures
But hey she also won two golden globes this year
The babe is clearly smoking
I knew something of the plot
Pedophilia mixed with nazi a recipe for a drama if ever there was one
But here’s what I did not expect
David Kross as the young Michael…..Ralph’s character
Was just brilliant
The love scenes with Kate as the older Hannah, seducing the 15-year-old Michael
Were just mesmerizing
The movie moved slowly
But I didn’t mind one bit
Because the story un-folded not in the big actions
But in the small intricacies
The look at Kate’s face spoke volumes
The stricken stare of Ralph showed Lena Olin how deep his love really was
For the fallen Hannah
The young David…losing and gaining his life’s story in one afternoon
The movie did not excuse the crimes of a nazi guard
But was the first time id ever seen anything that made me feel remotely sympathetic
and begged the question
what would you have done?
This is a subject I have thought a lot about growing up in a family that wanted all its children to remember the holocaust, that knew so many of its own blood
lost their lives to hitler
What would I have done if I were in nazi germany?
As a jew- would I have fought back or like so many obeyed…marched blindly into the gas chambers hoping to live?
As a non-jew would I have turned a blind’s eye like most seemed to, would i have resisted and risked the life of myself and my entire family….or god help me..joined out of peer pressure, fear and delusion….
oh of course i want to think that i would have joined but not the nazis but the resistance, hid in the shadows saving jews, killing nazis...but what about all my friends, all my family, all their lives possibly taken if i were to get caught...
would i be that brave? could i risk my loved ones to do the right thing?
or would the over-whelming wave of an entire nation caught up in brainwashing wash over me
I saw a little bit of this in this country when everyone regardless of how humanitarian they were seemed to jump on the george bush bandwagon
torture those damn moslems..they don't have rights they are killers
yelled the same people who a few years before were proud to be americans because we are the caring people
To be anti-war was to be anti-american
To be anti bush was to be anti-christian
to lose your human rights was okay to be more safe
And it was infectious
it made me wonder
If the Nazis rose to power again
How many of us would stand up to them
How many would cave in in fear
It’s a human condition
To want to survive and to do whatever it takes to do so
But sometimes living
Is not being alive
The movie like all truly great movies
Still sits in me demanding to be sifted over
Again and again
Let me go so I can do so
