Movie Review: The Reader (The Revenge Of Kate Winslet)

Time once again folks for yet another movie I haven't seen but will review with complete accuracy, after having seen only a print ad and a portion of one trailer on the flick! The movie this time is "The Reader", the second of two Kate Winslet vehicles produced so as to ensure Winslet maximum prospects for the upcoming Oscars - a canny agent and a not-inconsequential talent having failed to quite do the trick in previous attempts.

In The Reader, our heroine plays a woman in her thirties who seduces a teenage boy; they muck about sweatily in various locations for the first portion of the movie, then they fast forward to the future where the young boy is now a man, and where he mostly spends his time reminiscing about the experience.

Now, here's how the conversation actually goes as he recalls the experience, and remember, I haven't seen the movie or so much as a full commercial:

"I don't know; I'm conflicted. On the one hand, it was very enjoyable. I mean, I was a young man and she a beautiful older woman. On the other hand, it's as if I wasn't even there as she took me repeatedly. Some small portion of my soul died that first time, and a little piece every time after that. And what of her feelings for me? I felt as though she loved me, but not enough to risk the disapproval of society to stay with me. I only actually regained my humanity after years of therapy and watching all of Woody Allen's movies in chronological order".

Here's how the conversation should have gone:

"Screwed? Like rabbits man. It was my first time and it freaking ROCKED! Regrets? Are you kidding me? I was 17, she was 30. It was free. She provided all the condoms and then took me out to dinner. Downside? What effin' downside? I mean, sure, my Mom freaked out, and my old man took me aside and even though he gave me a stern lecture, he punched me on the shoulder when he was done. I think he was jealous. High Fives all around, boys. I'd ask you to smell my finger, but that would be juvenile. Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Winslet's character makes a few brief cameos in the latter portion of the movie, and the makeup artists have done her proud, adding the slightest amount of wrinkles plausible to make her a woman now in her late fifties, but leaving no doubt that she still had the bod and perhaps the inclination to climb his bones once again, for old time's sake, but for the fact that she's still got this thing for teenage boys. By this late point in the movie, Winslet's character is a teacher, thus ensuring her a steady supply of her favored paramour, age-wise speaking.

Throughout the movie, she does wonder at the unfairness of it all, much as she did as the dissatisfied housewife in Revolutionary Road; that Society should so restrain her more personal impulses, thus depriving her of personal fulfillment, Hollywood's representation of the top triangle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Self Actualization. It was her failure to achieve this goal in both roles that was the central indictment of Western Society intended by the Directors of both movies, since Self Actualization - as opposed to being anything particularly noble or significant - is in fact whatever the hell the individual wants it to be.

Winslet's characters throughout are infused with a sense of ennui - a vague dissatisfaction - the source of which she cannot identify, but very much like the dissatisfaction that Winslet herself feels when her Personal Assistant fails to cut the crust off her cucumber and arugula sandwiches. Whole scenes of the movie are devoted to her staring vacantly out the window, and we the audience are expected to stare with her, and share her discontent.

Regardless, this movie will do for Female Pedophiles what Woody Allen's life did for Male Pedophiles, although we're going to have to acknowledge that Woody actually dipped a little deeper into the old perversion pool by doing not just any teenager girl, but his own stepdaughter. Not that he was completely without standards. Allen did adopt Soon Yi before he molested her and then married her; otherwise it wouldn't have been incestuous to boot. On this last point, I'm not quite sure if we're in the presence of the Master of Irony, or simply the living god on Earth for a group of people so detached from reality and so addled with self regard that they spend their time doing these things, approving of movies that validate their excesses, and then round out the day attending fundraisers to allow Roman Polanski back into the U.S.

Either way, this movie gets a big thumbs up from Mary Kay LeTourneau and the seemingly dozens of superhot teachers who have popped up in the past decade for doing their adolescent male students, repeatedly, generally in the back seat of the kid's AMC Pacer, and frequently in the presence of his buddies. Wait, that was my generation. These kids will be driving Honda Civics.

But that we all should have been so lucky. Me, I'm going to spool up Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher", rock out, and hoist a glass to Kate Winslet, Mary Kay LeTourneau and the 17 year old boy in every man, who - truth be told - would have nailed Mary Kay or any of the rest of them faster than you can say, "dude, I am so there."