In apparent furtherance of the movie’s thesis that “the Holocaust was something that made victims of us all,” the movie scrupulously avoids the words “Jew” or “Jewish” and does not confront antisemitism–Hanna’s or anyone else’s–in any way, shape or form.

Hanna’s trial is presented as a miscarriage of justice, complete with a smug, unsympathetic judge (against whom Anna scores a brief victory by silencing him with the question, “What would YOU have done?”), and mean, unsympathetic crowds who shout “Nazi!” at Hanna at her sentencing. Even the student in Kross’s class who gets all shouty when discussing genocide, gets overexcited about the concept of “justice”, and suggests that all war criminals should kill themselves out of shame or be lined up and shot, ultimately concludes that Hanna’s trial is arbitrary, and that she (as opposed to all the others who supported or participated in the Holocaust) was only on trial because someone had happened to write a book about her. The movie makes it clear that–unlike the judge, the angry crowd, the shouty student–the proper attitude to adopt toward the crimes of Holocaust is one of ambivalence. Although Hanna ultimately serves less time than the average American pot offender, it is presented as a travesty that she should be put in jail for committing a crime.

To further bias our sympathies toward Hanna, there is a huge contrast between the trajectory of Hanna’s life in her tiny prison cell and the life of the Holocaust survivor who put her there. When Fiennes goes to visit the survivor at the end of the movie, she is living in a cavernous, expensively (and tackily) appointed Manhattan apartment. When Fiennes presents the tin Hanna wishes to give the survivor by way of atonement–one of Hanna’s only earthly possessions–the survivor has a few other, better, tins already sitting on the coffee table. And the dirty bills in the tin pathetically contrast with the luxury on display. If the Holocaust made victims of everyone, some victims are certainly faring better than others. When we first saw the survivor, her nightmare had ended–but Hanna’s had just begun.

Finally, could it really have been that much of a shock to find that a German of Hanna’s age had either worked for or supported Hitler? Such Germans couldn’t have been hard to come by at the time this movie takes place, but the movie treats her as the exception rather than the rule. Because the movie presents stumbling upon a Nazi in postwar Germany as such an anomaly, you could come away from this movie thinking that those who were not, like Hanna, among the (apparently rare) few who were directly employed by Hitler did not know or endorse what was happening in the camps.

I don’t believe all the deck-stacking in Hanna’s favor is rooted in antisemitism; I just think it’s rooted in the default desire of a certain kind of intellectual to see two sides to every story, to see in complex shades of gray rather than black and white, to express moral ambivalence rather than moral outrage. With regard to Nazism, I do, in fact, find this is a worthy goal, and in fact believe that any Holocaust movie should implicate the audience, should cause the audience to empathize with Nazis and be disgusted by their empathy–should show us how we are all capable of committing the crimes the Nazis committed. However, downplaying the actual crimes and giving us a Nazi in the form of a naked Kate Winslet, to make empathy easier, is not the way to do it. The movie asks us to identify more with a beautiful, illiterate woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time than with anything resembling a Nazi.

@ Ron — Intrade says you’d better be ready for Kate Winslet getting that Oscar for her work in a film that sounds increasingly wrong the more you hear about it. I think the gods are punishing you personally for leaning on the Emperor’s New trope one time too many :p

And yet the reverent reviews this film has got from people who should know better. Are they out of their mind? Or does the reverence for a “serious” film with “serious” actors and “serious” pretentions outweigh, overwhelm their “serious” powers of judgement? I’m totally baffled.

I thought you would no better than to speak for other people’s tastes. I find it rather presumptuous to assume that everyone has to see things the way you do. You are fully entitled to disagree with the critics who do like it. You are entitled to disagree strongly and intensely. But to say someone would have to be out of their mind to like this film is pretty egotistical, and it shows that you have a hard time seeing or respecting how other people think. There’s a line between feeling intensely negatively towards something and not respecting those who don’t see it that way.