簡介
THE READER opens in post-WWII Germany when teenager Michael Berg becomes ill and is helped home by Hanna, a stranger twice his age. Michael recovers from scarlet fever and seeks out Hanna to thank her. The two are quickly drawn into a passionate but secretive affair. Michael discovers that Hanna loves being read to and their physical relationship deepens. Hanna is enthralled as Michael reads to her from "The Odyssey," "Huck Finn" and "The Lady with the Little Dog." Despite their intense bond, Hanna mysteriously disappears one day and Michael is left confused and heartbroken. Eight years later, while Michael is a law student observing the Nazi war crime trials, he is stunned to find Hanna back in his life - this time as a defendant in the courtroom. As Hanna's past is revealed, Michael uncovers a deep secret that will impact both of their lives. THE READER is a story about truth and reconciliation, about how one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another. Written by The Weinstein Company

Middle aged German barrister Michael Berg recollects to himself his lifelong acquaintance with Hanna Schmitz, a relationship with whom he never disclosed to anyone close to him. Michael first met Hanna in 1958, when he was fifteen, she thirty-one. The two had a turbulent summer long love affair, dictated by Hanna that their encounters would begin with him reading to her followed by lovemaking. Michael next encountered Hanna in 1966, when Michael, now a law student, attended the Nazi war crimes trial of five female former S.S. concentration camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. Through listening to the testimony, Michael comes to the realization that he is in possession of information which could save Hanna from a life in prison, information which she herself is unwilling to disclose. In deciding what to do, Michael is torn between his differing views of justice.

較詳細的
Michael Berg (David Kross), a fifteen year old young man living in Berlin in 1958, gets off the tram, ducks into a doorway and vomits. An woman in her mid thirties (Kate Winslet) sees him and, after cleaning up after him, helps him get home. The doctor diagnoses him with scarlet fever and orders three months bedrest. All Michael can do is examine his stamps and bide his time.

When he is better, he returns to the apartment building to deliver a bouquet of flowers in thanks to the woman. She is matter of fact with him but asks him to escort her to work on the tramline. But when she catches him spying on her as she dresses, he runs away in shame. When he returns to apologize a few days later, she seduces him. He persuades her to tell him her name -- Hanna. Michael returns to her every day after school, rejecting the clear interest of girls his own age. She asks him to read to her, and he brings her great works of world literature. He sells his stamps so they can go on a bicycle tour in the countryside. When Hanna is promoted by the tram company, she becomes unsettled and snaps at Michael when he tries to read her Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog." They make love one last time and she then moves away without telling him where she is going. Michael is heartbroken.

Eight years later (1966), Michael attends Heidelberg Law School. He is part of a seminar on the Holocaust, taught by Rohl (Bruno Ganz). The class attends the joint trial of six former guards at Auschwitz. Michael is shocked to learn that Hanna is one of the defendants. He is appalled to learn that Hanna was responsible for selecting Jewish women to be sent to death camps and was part of the forced march of hundreds of Jews from one camp to another; when the building in which the Jewish women were being housed overnight was set afire, Hanna and the other guards let them burn to death because to free them would have risked too much chaos. Hanna does not deny what she did and even rationalizes it. During testimony, it is revealed that Hanna had had camp prisoners read to her at night. The other guards claim that Hanna was the instigator of all the crimes and, rather than submit to a handwriting sample to disprove their claims, agrees with them. In the audience, Michael realizes that Hanna wanted others to read to her because she is illiterate. Urged on by Rohl but disturbed by a classmate who believes former Nazis should be killed, Michael tries to visit Hanna in prison to encourage her to tell the truth but, ashamed of his past with her, decides not to. Hanna is sentenced to life in prison.

As an adult, Michael (Ralph Fiennes) marries and has a daughter but remains emotionally withdrawn. His marriage ends and he becomes distant from his daughter. Discovering the books he had read to Hanna decades earlier, he re-establishes contact with her by reading the books into a tape recorder and sending them to her in prison. Using them as a guide, Hanna teaches herself to read and write. She sends him letters in return but he never responds. When it is time for her parole in 1990, Michael is the only person the prison social worker can contact. He reluctantly agrees to sponsor Hanna. He finds an apartment and job for her but, when he visits her a week before she is to be released, he is aloof to her. She tells him that before the trial, she never thought about what she did as an SS guard but thinks about nothing else now. After he leaves, she commits suicide. In her will, she asks Michael to give her life's savings to the family of one of the prisoners at Auschwitz. Michael visits the woman's daughter (Lena Olin) in New York and confesses his affair with Hanna for the first time. She refuses to forgive or accept the money but instead takes the tea tin Hanna had kept the money in, as it reminds her of a tin she had before she was sent to Auschwitz as a child. They agree to give the money to a Jewish literacy organization.

In 1995, Michael reunites with his daughter, Julia (Hannah Herzsprung), who has just returned from a year in Paris. He admits his failings as a father and drives her to a church that he and Hanna had visited during their bicycle tour nearly forty years earlier. He shows her Hanna's grave and begins to tell her his and Hanna's story.

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''The Reader'' begins in 1995 Berlin, where a well-dressed Michael Berg is preparing breakfast for a woman who has one-night stand|spent the night at his apartment. The two part awkwardly, and as Michael watches an Berlin S-Bahn pass by outside afterwards the film flashes back to another tram in 1958 Neustadt. An unhappy-looking teenaged Michael gets off but wanders around the streets afterwards, finally pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he starts to vomiting|vomit. Hanna Schmitz, the tram Conductor, comes in and assists him in returning home. Michael is diagnosed with scarlet fever and must rest at home for the next three months. After he recovers he visits Hanna at her apartment and thanks her. The two begin an affair that lasts through that summer. Their liaisons, at her apartment, are characterized by him reading literary works he is studying in school to her, such as ''The Odyssey'', "The Lady with the Dog" and ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn''. After the two go on a bicycling trip and Hanna is promoted to the offices at the tram company, she abruptly moves without letting Michael know where she has gone.

After another brief return to the adult Michael, who drives to a court where he is a lawyer, we see him again at Heidelberg University in 1966. As part of a special seminar taught by Professor Rohl, a camp survivor, he observes a trial of several women who were accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the Death marches following the 1944 evacuation of Auschwitz concentration camp. Michael is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants.

He visits a former camp himself to try to come to terms with this. The trial divides the seminar, with one student angrily saying there is nothing to be learned from it other than that evil acts occurred. He tells Rohl that the older generation of Germans should kill themselves for their failure to act then and now.

The key evidence is the testimony of Ilana Mather, a young Jewish woman who has written a memoir about how she and her mother survived. When Hanna testifies, unlike her fellow defendants, she admits that she was aware Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the ten women she chose during each month's were subsequently gassed. She denies authorship of a report on the barn fire, despite pressure from the other defendants, but then admits it when asked to provide a handwriting sample.

Michael then realizes Hanna's secret: she is illiterate and has made many of her life choices to conceal that. Even her choice to join the SS was made because of her desire to avoid a job promotion meaning she would have had to reveal her illiteracy. Without being specific, Michael informs Rohl that he has information favorable to one of the defendants but is not sure what to do since the defendant herself wants to avoid disclosing this. Rohl tells him that if he has learned nothing from the past there is no point in having the seminar.

Hanna receives a ife sentence for her role in the church deaths while the other defendants get terms of a few years. Michael meanwhile marries, has a daughter and divorces. Rediscovering his books and notes from the time of his affair with Hanna, he begins reading some of those works into a tape recorder. He sends the cassettes and another tape recorder to her in prison. Eventually she uses these to teach herself to read the books themselves from the prison library, and writes back to him.

Michael does not write back or visit, but keeps sending tapes, and in 1988 the prison's warden writes to him to seek his help in arranging for her after her forthcoming release. He finds a place for her to live and a job, and sees her in person to tell her these things. The night before her sentence ends she hangs herself and leaves a note to Michael and a tea tin with cash in it.

Later, Michael travels to New York. He meets Ilana and confesses his past relationship with Hanna to her. He tells her that Hanna was illiterate for most of her life but that her suicide note told him to give both the cash, some money she had in a bank account and the tea tin to Ilana. After telling Michael there is nothing to be learned from the camps and that he should go to the theater if he is seeking catharsis. Michael suggests that he donate the money to a organization that combats adult illiteracy, preferably a Jewish one, and she agrees. Ilana keeps the tea tin since it is similar to one she herself had owned before being sent to the camps, where it was taken from her to be melted down.

The film ends with Michael getting back together with his daughter, Julia, whom he admits he has grown apart from. He takes her to Hanna's grave and begins to tell her the story.

以上都是來自英文網站 不存在語法上的錯誤

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　　劇情介紹
故事發生在二戰後的德國，一個名叫米夏·伯格的15歲少年愛上了36歲公共汽車售票員的漢娜（凱特·溫絲萊特 飾）。在他們隱秘的戀情中，米夏發現漢娜最愛聽他讀書，以及他們熱烈的身體關係。經她請求，米夏為他朗讀各種文學作品，從《奧德賽》、《哈克費恩曆險記》到《帶叭狗的女人》。盡管他們的關係和諧而美好，但一天漢娜突然離開，並從此杳無音信。直到8年後，米夏（拉爾夫·費因斯 飾）作為法律係大學生參與法庭實習，發現漢娜作為二戰戰犯坐在被告席上！漢娜的過往就此被揭開，而她誓死要維護的是她文盲的秘密……

花絮
由史蒂芬·戴德利執導、凱特·溫絲萊特、拉爾夫·費因斯主演的《朗讀者》近日曝光預告片。《朗讀者》講述一個男孩和是他兩倍大的女人充滿非法激情的忘年戀，而故事的深層含義則是近代德國人對於曆史、暴行與原罪的自我鞭笞式的反思。

德國哲學家阿多諾曾說：奧斯維辛之後寫詩是野蠻的。經曆過苦難的人們不可能繼續蜷縮在“詩歌”塑造的美的幻境中，現實的瘋狂比詩更能令人警醒。而《朗讀者》卻用另一種方式來詮釋“文學”與“罪惡”的關係，同樣沉痛而觸目驚心。

《朗讀者》改編自德國作家本哈德·施林克的小說，它曾被譯為39種語言暢銷全球，並且成為紐約時報排行榜上銷量最好的德語小說。此次《朗讀者》被改編為電影，由兩位演技派明星主演，影片還未上映就已經被預定為奧斯卡熱門（溫絲萊特更是憑借本片和《革命之路》上了雙保險）。電影的預告片聚焦於二人相愛的美好時光，充滿了溫柔純淨的美感，而書中描寫的漢娜老年時因絕望和罪惡的重壓而自棄、衰老、自殺的種種情景則未出現。之前片場照驚鴻一瞥的溫絲萊特的老年扮相，也要等觀眾自己去電影院中欣賞了。

《朗讀者》將於2008年12月12日全美公映。

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　　For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved is a criminal. Much about her behaviour during the trial does not make sense. But then suddenly, and terribly, it does - Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret. 'A tender, horrifying novel that shows blazingly well how the Holocaust should be dealt with in fiction. A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience' INDEPENDENT SATURDAY MAGAZINE --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

書的

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　　1.A thoughtful and plausible examination of guilt
Very well acted and presented and a faithful representation of the main points of the novel on which it is based. This film encourages us to look closely at very difficult issues surrounding the atrocities of World War II. I am at a loss to understand why so many critics have been so damning of it. Perhaps it is too subtle for them to understand. It seeks to outlaw the false and intellectually lazy theory to explain the holocaust, namely that the horrors were committed by monsters. In its place we are offered contextualization, not as excuse but as explanation of how quite ordinary people were able to do extraordinarily dreadful things. We avoid these uncomfortable facts at our peril.

2.A nice tale which let's the viewer come to his own conclusions
The story is a simple one, with a twist. A boy has an affair with an older woman, who one day abandons him without a word. A quiet, sensitive boy, in post WW2 Germany. Finding him retching outside her house she takes him in and cleans him up. When he recuperates and comes to thank her, the relationship becomes kinetic.

He is educated, she is not. He is innocent, she is not. They make a trade. If he'll read his books of literature to her, she'll please him sexually. He learns little of her, and she doesn't offer much to him, except her body. When he pleads for more, she berates him with: "you mean nothing to me." It is a prophetic remark that shows us more of her, but little else is forthcoming, and when he hesitantly asks her if she means it, she seems to grudgingly back down. As it turns out this exchange may be crucial for the boy's, and our understanding of her character.

A few years later, when attending a war crimes trial for a class, he is stunned to see his former lover as one of those accused. She was a guard at Auschwitz. The young man is devastated, but holds his silence to his friends. He decides to visit her in jail but backs out. Then he realizes that he has evidence that can change the course of her trial, but continues to keep silent.

It is his silence that makes up the core of this movie, and it is it's unraveling that is left to the audience. Is his reason simple or complex? Is he acting out of cowardice, malice, or a sense of justice? As a man (Ralph Fiennes) he one day decides to send her one of the books he used to read to her. But not the book, rather a tape he has made of himself reading the book. He had realized in the trial that the one thing he knew about her, was the one thing that might have given her a more lenient sentence: she is illiterate. How this could have been a mitigating factor I won't divulge.

Using his tapes and looking at the books she teaches herself to read, and starts to write to him, but he never responds, continuing his silence, and yet continuing to correspond to her as a "Reader." What are we to make of him? Or her? My take on it, is that she was a simple, concrete soul, used to taking orders, and able to separate herself emotionally from her job, yet remaining shallow in spite of all the fine literature she is exposed to. She ends up being able to read, but never able to fathom. She comes across not as callous, but as vapid.

He on the other hand comes across as a weak man, unable to grapple with the paradox of loving a "monster," who he never knew as a monster. Unable to offer much except that which he can do at a distance. He is not callous, but is, like his erstwhile lover, emotionally hollow.

Winslett is haunting, and emanates pathos. The boy David Kross is winning as a winsome lad. All in all the movie held up well and was engrossing, but I could have done without the final scene with Lena Olin, who plays a victim of the holocaust, imperiously, and unsympathetically, and the scene seems to have had only one purpose: to allow her to get in the pregnant line: "you can learn nothing from the camps."

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　　自己不會去搜啊