The Reader by its very nature is a controversial movie. Filled with weighty questions about ethical and moral responsibility, the film walks a very tight rope about questioning how humans are motivated to do some truly awful things, and how people years later try to make sense of these things. This movie is easily contentious, but at the same time, it’s easily the least deserving of Best Picture consideration at this past year’s Academy Awards. The performances are solid, as are the actors producing them, but it’s difficult to make sense of the ever-shifting timeline and the even more shifty motivations of the main characters.

The story begins in the 1950s, where we meet a 15-year-old German boy named Michael Berg (David Kross), who begins an affair with a tram operator named Hannah Schmitz, a woman several years his senior. After a summer of love and passion, Hannah disappears leaving Michael broken-hearted. About 10 years later, an emotionally distant Michael is in a prestigious law school, when his seminar class travels to a war crimes trial of a group of women who worked as guards at a concentration camp, and one of them turns out to be Hannah. Over the years, we see Michael struggle with not just the fact that he had (and may still have) feelings for this Nazi, but he also realizes Hannah’s horrible secret that could grant her a measure of leniency from the court.

Now Hannah’s secret was spoiled for me in advanced when I read a Roger Ebert article about issues surrounding this movie, so maybe my judgment is clouded. But it seemed to me that the fact that Hannah is (SPOILER) illiterate, really wasn’t played as that big of a twist, and is, in fact, rather obvious. At times the film feels like it walks almost right up to the point wherein Hannah’s illiteracy and her previous devotion to Nazism are related, but it’s a line that the filmmakers seem unwilling to cross. But the confused morality of Hannah’s character are in conflict with the fact that we never do understand why she joined the S.S in the first place, and why it is exactly that out of all her co-defendants she’s the only one that feels some measure of guilt.

There’s also an open-ended question about why Hannah took up with young Michael in the first place, a fact that actually didn’t occur to me until after the credits rolled. Fortunately Winlset, who’s universally exceptional, manages to play the ambiguity in her favour and make Hannah bizarrely sympathetic. The problem is that Hannah really isn’t that sympathetic despite her honesty and honest acceptance of her role in the Holocaust, as minor as it was. Ignorance is no excuse, but in Winslet’s hands there’s some degree of forgiveness, although logically you can’t get over how messed up it all seems. One must admire the actress’ fearlessness though.

But that loose thread in this tapestry, the thing about Hannah’s affair with Michael, I still wonder what the motivation behind it was. Did she really love him? I don’t know, maybe. Is it not beyond creepy that she would have him read to her in similar fashion as her former charges in the concentration camp? Most definitely. Michael’s character has a certain degree of mystery too. How and why did Hannah hurt him so by leaving? And his decision to keep to Hannah’s illiteracy to himself after he puts the pieces together, was it out of spite for dumping him, or disgust over her previously unknown allegiances? I realize the mystery in the story is inherent in the larger mysteries of life itself, but whatever motivations the actors found for their performances are kept to themselves.

What was interesting though was the moral debate. I wish that there was more of that in the finished film; more debate, more questioning, and more answers. I did find myself getting wrapped up in the people, but after the movie ended I was forced to wonder what the point of it all was. It works really hard to not take sides in a situation where the sides are obviously laid out in distinct and discernable corners. Like The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas, The Reader uses the “If Only” defense by inferring that ignorance breeds gullibility. And while that’s true to a certain degree, the movie doesn’t offer a rational to make the exception. And as a result The Reader remains an interesting, if not overly engaging, examination of terrible human instincts.