Unknown

Unknown - Dir. Dir. Jaume Collet-Serra (2011)

Most actors tend to take less physical roles by the time they hit 60. Not Liam Neeson, who has reinvented himself as a badass action hero following the success of Taken. He's certainly believable as an unstoppable killing machine with his deep voice and imposing 6'4 frame. Unknown certainly feels like it came from the same Luc Besson machine that churned out Taken with Neeson cutting a swath through menacing Euro-trash villains. On the contrary, Unknown comes from the Joel Silver action factory. It was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who also helmed the horror film Orphan, and based on the novel Out of My Head by French novelist Didier Van Cauwelaert.

Neeson stars as Dr. Martin Harris, a biologist who has just arrived in Berlin for a biotechnology conference with his wife Liz (January Jones). A terrible accident in a taxicab leaves Martin in a coma for several days. When he awakens, he is shocked to discover another man (Aidan Quinn) is now claiming to be Dr. Martin Harris and Liz has no idea who he is. Or Martin's memories a delusion or has he fallen into an elaborate conspiracy? The only clue to uncovering Martin's true identity is the cab driver, Gina (Diane Kruger), who is reluctant to come forward because she is an illegal immigrant from Bosnia.

Unknown is the type of standard fare we've come to expect from a post-Bourne world. The film boils down the Hitchcockian wrong man formula to its barest essentials while trying to plug in various plot holes with fist fights and car chases. Luckily, the one taxi Martin gets into happens to belong to the hottest cab driver in all of Germany. And, of course, Neeson will regain his memories just in the nick of time to dish out some serious beatings.

Neeson is a capable enough actor to make all this silliness credible. He's backed up by some good European talent like Sebastian Koch from The Lives of Others and Rainer Bock from Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. Frank Langella also turns in a creepy performance as one of Martin's colleagues. The most intriguing character belongs to Bruno Ganz as a former Stasi officer turned private investigator. Ganz is best known as playing Hitler in Downfall, also known as the Hitler from all those YouTube videos where he laments about Burning Man, X-Box Live, and becoming a meme. Too bad you cannot say the same for January Jones. The Mad Men actress turns in another blank-eyed robotic performance as Martin's cold fish wife.

Unknown is best described as Taken meets The Bourne Identity. It's a ridiculous and pedestrian action thriller that may provide some diverting pleasure for about two hours.

Rating: ** (*****)

The Reader

The Reader - Dir. Stephen Daldry (2008)


The Reader dances a thin line between arthouse drama and softcore porn. Kate Winslet once again bares flesh in this adaptation of the best-selling German novel from The Hours writing/directing team of David Hare and Stephen Daldry.

Young actor David Kross plays Michael Berg, a teenage boy who becomes fixated with Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz, a middle-aged ticket taker. They meet during a rainy day when Michael falls ill outside Hanna’s apartment building. Hanna’s remark, ”Have you always been this weak?” succinctly sets the tone for their relationship. Michael spends the next three months bedridden having been diagnosed with scarlet fever. Healthy once more, Michael visits Hanna’s apartment to bring her flowers as a thank you. He glimpses Hanna getting dressed and putting on her stockings. Caught, he runs away but returns the next day. Michael gets dirty after fetching Hanna coal and she orders him into her tub and returns to dry him. Oh, she’s naked now.

As their illicit affair progresses, Hanna begins asking Michael about his studies. She eventually has Michael read to her, always before sex, never after. He reads Hanna The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, and even Lady Chatterly’s Lover while in the tub together. She finds the latter disgusting, but asks him to continue. The relationship becomes tempestuous as Michael finds himself split between Hanna, his family, and school friends. Before the summer is over, Hanna has disappeared without as much as a word to anyone.

Eight years later, Michael is now studying law and sits in the audience at a war crimes trial. He is shocked to hear Hanna’s name called as one of the defendants. Before they ever met, she was a member of the SS and prison guard at a satellite camp near Auschwitz. He feels both love and revulsion. The film unfolds in a non-linear fashion beginning with a middle-aged Michael in the 1995. His time with Hanna has left a hole in his heart and informed his relationships with other women. Michael is divorced with an estranged daughter. We jump back and forth from Michael’s childhood to adulthood when he later sends an imprisoned Hanna books on tape he recorded himself.

The romance between Michael and Hanna acts a parable to the feelings of the post-WWII generation of Germans trying to come to grips with the horrors of the Holocaust. Anger, guilt, the sins of the father, and all that. The Reader starts off well, but there is an almost mechanical and sterile fashion to the way it treats the subject matter. I haven’t read the novel, yet I can safely guess (as with most adaptations) that a lot of the subtext and added layers were lost in the translation. Even when Michael visits Auschwitz and walks through the barracks, it still feels like too clean like a History Channel reenactment.

Though the storytelling falls short, the acting is strong across the board. Winslet really carries the entire picture on her shoulders. She’s de-glamorized for much of the film and is buried under make-up to play the eighty year-old Hanna. However, Winslet’s performance is much more than a reliance on gimmicks. Ironically, her character is the hardest to read. Like others of her generation, larger circumstances led to her falling in with the Nazi party, but how much she shared with their ideology is never revealed. Nor do we ever fully comprehend her culpability in the deaths of her prisoners. She is the perfect microcosm for the majority of the population during that time. Though she may not have personally killed anyone, she stood by and watched. She went along with it. She was only following orders. Michael too is guilty of remaining silent. He learns of a deep kept secret of Hanna’s, one that would affect the outcome of the trial. He ultimately says nothing out of guilt and, perhaps, as a way to punish Hanna for abruptly leaving him. Ralph Fiennes gives a quiet pain to the older Michael Berg. Fiennes own subdued performance in The Duchess came off cold and cruel, here it’s tormented uncertainty. Maybe that has more to do with context than anything else.

Rating: ** 1/2