Hanna's condition is by no means a metaphor for the moral illiteracy of nazism. She is shown as being the only honest defendant among the guards on trial; she silences the presiding judge with a heartfelt: "What would you have done?" She only takes the blame for having written a mendacious SS report, and therefore having been the guards' ringleader, because disproving it would mean submitting a handwriting specimen - and Hanna is still ashamed of being illiterate.
The dramatic and emotional structure of the film insidiously invites us to see Hanna's secret misery as a species of victimhood that, if not exactly equivalent to that of her prisoners, is certainly something to be weighed thoughtfully in the balance, and to see a guilt-free human vulnerability behind war crimes. The movie boldly flashes backwards and forwards between Michael's youth and middle age, but there are no flashbacks to the Auschwitz era, so we cannot judge the central facts of Hanna's life and behaviour, and her continuing silence on the subject of antisemitism is never challenged. One sequence shows the older Michael wandering thoughtfully through the deserted but clean and tidy camp with its grim bunks and shower rooms. Were West German law students really allowed to do this? Unaccompanied?
In a final scene, Ralph Fiennes, as the older Michael, comes to New York to visit Ilana Mather, one of Hanna's surviving victims, bearing Hanna's savings in an old tea-can. (Alexandra Maria Lara plays Ilana as a young woman, with whom young Michael had exchanged a friendly grimace of sympathy in court; she is played in middle age by Lena Olin.) This is because Hanna wanted Ilana to have her money, to do with "as she wishes". Surely any sentient human being, no matter how burdened they might feel by a perverse obligation to carry out Hanna's wishes, would see what a grotesque insult that is? Michael's failure to acknowledge it is one of the most agonising, toe-curling aspects of the film.
He explains Hanna's illiteracy to Ilana and the woman asks sharply: "Is that an explanation? Or an excuse?" This highly pertinent question never gets a satisfactory answer from Michael or anyone else. Ilana does not take the money, but incredibly, she does accept the battered old tea-can because it resembles one she lost in the camps - thus legitimising this appalling payment in a far deeper, more emotional sense. The sheer fatuity of this exchange left me gasping.
Kate Winslet thus participates in the Hollywood tradition of having the Nazi played by a Brit; she is very good, and in fact no purely technical objections could conceivably be levelled in any direction. But I can't forgive this film for being so shallow and so obtuse on such a subject, and I can't accept it as a parable for war-guilt-by-association suffered by goodish Germans of the next generation. Under the gloss of high production value, under the sheen of hardback good taste, there is something naive and glib and meretricious. It left a very strange taste in my mouth.
