Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is a successful middleaged attorney living in Berlin in the mid-'90s. One morning, he flashes back to his youth, when as a teenage boy (played by David Kross) he meets Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a woman twice his age. The war has been over for a dozen years, and Germany is rebuilding, bustling, yet still haunted by Hitler's past.

Michael and Hanna begin a passionate, yet oddly joyless, affair. During their time together, Michael begins reading literature to Hanna—Chekov and Homer and Twain. She absorbs the tales and his company but holds herself at arm's length. Hanna is a tortured soul, private and seemingly somehow dehumanized.

One day, without a word, Hanna packs and leaves her apartment without a goodbye. Young Michael is emotionally crushed but continues his studies. Several years later, as a law student, he attends the trial of six women who served as Nazi SS guards during the war, accused of murdering hundreds of Jews.

Michael discovers Hanna to be one of the women on trial.

One can interpret "The Reader" on a multitude of levels: a fractured love story, a tale of social morals, even one of guilt and redemption, possibly even betrayal. It is also a story about the Holocaust—not a war story but a story about shattered humanity.

Is Hanna a victim of the war? And, if so, of what duplicity? During the trial, Michael believes she may very well be a victim, yet he is appalled by the atrocities that the court has accused her of, actionsthat she freely admits.

Unfortunately for the film, this is where the drama sputters. Michael believes he knows certain truths about Hanna, evidence that neither her lawyer nor the court knows, and yet he cannot bring himself to come forward with the information. Instead, he turns in on himself, emotionally devastated, fragmented. Even his law professor urges him to do what he must in the name of justice, but Michael remains mute.

To say more would be to reveal too much, although in all truthfulness it seems "The Reader" itself is too spent to reveal more, as if the dramatic tide has crashed upon the beach and then receded, leaving little evidence of its ebb and flow, of its power and potential.

The film wants us to believe that Michael is protecting a secret—a secret important to Hanna—but in doing so, is he himself guilty of a crime? And to what degree?

Perhaps, in reality, doing nothing is more justifiable than making a wrong move, but in drama? In drama, nothing is simply nothing, and the frustration of those of us who cry out—make a move, even a wrong move for the right reason—slowly percolates like hot bile.

No other genre carries the sadness, the hopelessness of those films about the Holocaust. (I was rebuked once by a woman when I referred to a cinematic incident as "a holocaust." No, she told me, that is a word sacred to Jews, a word that "only belongs to those who died in the camps." And while I disagree with those who feel compelled to "claim" words as their own, I've found myself since avoiding the particular word for those depictions of nuclear "faux pas" or alien "termination" in movies. Such is the potency of the word.)

And a film that loses that potency? Perhaps one might choose to view "The Reader" as an attempt toward reconciliation. After the hatred and the anger and the need for retribution dies, what comes next? At some point, in any conflict, forgiveness must prevail before the healing begins. But is "The Reader" a film, ultimately, about forgiveness?

I don't have the answer. Yet if "The Reader" is attempting to prod us forward, it does so with such timidity and uncertainty as to render the gesture almost meaningless. It is not a bad film by any stretch; it is remarkably well told and acted (especially by Winslet and Kross)—yet its lingering ambiguity frustrates those of us who want to know what ultimately lies beyond the pain and anguish.