Less middlebrow than uni-middlebrow, director Stephen Daldry’s three features are a mixed mishegoss, from the energetic sexual-confusion-coming-of-age of “Billy Elliot” to the tony video for Philip Glass’ score, “The Hours” (some of which is fetchingly lovingly to behold) and now, the tasteful, yet often tasteless, reportedly unfinished “The Reader.” Inside baseball warning: during the post-production of this adaptation by David Hare of Bernard Schlink’s beloved-to-Germans novel about guilt, legacy and forgiveness, Daldry asked for more time to edit. Rehearsing the Broadway transfer of the West End musical of “Billy Elliot,” he pled exhaustion, wanting not to have to edit the film by night to meet a Christmas release. Arguments between producers ensued, with Harvey Weinstein winning the day and co-producer Scott Rudin removing his name from the product. Isn’t that interesting? In “The Reader,” David (David Kross), 15, has his virginity taken by Hanna, a much older woman (Kate Winslet). (Reverse the sexual roles and if the movie could even be made, it would be called “The Raper.”) Years pass, the boy grows into Ralph Fiennes and is shocked, shocked, to find the woman he’d done bouncy-bouncy with in the bathtub was in fact a Nazi criminal. Considering the material, their first meeting is indelibly creepy, where Hanna is a streetcar conductor; the location cannot but suggest the trains that led millions to the camps and their mass murder. I’m a firm believer that any subject can and ought to be tackled, even if it’s one of seven or twenty or forty films released during awards season that take on WWII or the Holocaust. The one hope? That the result is any good. Winslet’s a wonder, and in an entirely different register than her fine turn in “Revolutionary Road.” Daldry means to swaddle her in weltschmerz but drowns her instead in schmaltz. Hare’s storyline alternates present and past in a way that suggests less parallelism than the lines that never converge on horizons or in schematic, overly simple screenwriting. The director who comes closest to mind for this meretricious material is the Lars Trier that sent poor Björk surely to hell in stern, elegant fashion in the closing shots of “Dancer in the Dark.” His saturnine, even malefic side would understand how to write what’s wrong. Oscar Wilde put it this way: “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.” Nico Muhly’s score is often lovely on its own, but inappropriately mickey-mouses scenes that ought to make sense without his work. With Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara. 123m. (Ray Pride)
