“Who would have guessed that a book only 218 pages long could stir up so many emotions!” That quote, which graces the press notes for Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, is attributed to Oprah Winfrey, who selected the novel on which the film is based for her book club. As always, Oprah means no harm, but her influence makes such off-handed insipidity potentially dangerous. But relax –– in this case, she’s just reflecting the party line of the marketable middlebrow: Art must be Big in order to make you Feel. It’s as an ingrained assumption for one type of cultural arbiter and/or consumer, as knee-jerk suspicion of the tropes of Oscar bait is for another.

In the hands of Daldry, who has to this point never made a film for which he was not nominated for an Oscar, The Reader certainly looks like the kind of Big Art About Feelings worthy of an Oprah seal of approval … and/or a shudder from the cynic’s section. The economy that marked Bernard Schlink’s novel about moral impasses and emotional dysfunction amongst two generations Germans in the decades after the Holocaust goes untranslated. Daldry spoonfeeds feeling through score, he gives us long, indulgent sex scenes with an oft-naked Kate Winslet, years too young for the character she plays, draped in improbably golden light. And yet, within the wrappings of a film clearly, carefully calibrated for Academy favor by a distributor who couldn’t be in greater need of such recognition, The Reader’s unwillingness to clean up the ambiguities that sit at the core of its source surprises. Its classiness gives way to a refreshingly messy, even tawdry honesty about the role of morality in memory.

It’s Germany in the 50s, and 15 year-old Michael (Daivd Kross) is having a summer fling with Hanna (Kate Winslet), a streetcar ticket taker in her late 30s. Hanna takes Michael’s virginity and teaches him how to do it, do it, and do it well; however, because all older women who sleep with younger men (in movies) have deep secrets and vast reserves of sadness, she’s not crazy about talking, per se. Then one day, she asks Michael to read to her from one of his school books, and thus begins a ritual: she won’t put out until she hears a few verses of The Odyssey. Michael rolls with his lady’s kink because he’s in love. And then she disappears.

Years later, when Michael is a law student, he sees Hanna again: he’s observing a Nazi war crime trial, and she’s a defendant. As if the sudden revelation that his first love is personally responsible for the death of hundreds of Jews is not gut-wrenching enough, Michael is soon put into a position wherein he could save Hanna prison time by revealing her greatest secret. Doing so would require revealing his own; heartbroken and horrified, he’s torn between helping his former love and allowing her to be punished, not just for her war crimes but for her personal betrayal. While on the stand, when questioned as to why she signed up as a concentration camp guard, Hanna turns the question to the judge: “What would you have done?” If your first love and sexual mentor was revealed to be a Nazi, and if by admitting that she liked to be read aloud to before sex, you could reduce her prison sentence  — what would YOU have done?

The material suggests that for the generation of Germans reckoning with the crimes of older loved ones, emotional parlysis was epidemic. The Reader is most effective when conveying the precarious limbo of conflicting emotions — of having so many feelings that are so in conflict with one another that you can express nothing. The reverberations of harm within romance are writ large over historical tragedy, and on paper, it’s a pat equation — Michael didn’t spend time in the camps, but falling in love with a Nazi left its own scars from which he never recovered –– but there are moments where it’s rendered, particularly in Ralph Fiennes’ expert performance as the older Michael, with a subtle grace that greases the extreme conflation between the personal and the political. When engaging in the usual overblown tropes piled on to Oscar bait to make “difficult” material like this palatable to a mass audience, The Reader is disposable. But Fiennes transcends tropes and types, and in the moments where it’s just him in front of the camera, he’s creating a fully-realized human being. You don’t realize how rare that is in a Hollywood film until you see it done well.

There have been criticisms that The Reader is cold, but its projection of distanced feeling is, in a way, a relief. This is not a movie which makes us contemplate the unspeakable horrors committed by the unquestionably evil servants of Hitler and then, after we have our cathartic cry, walk out feeling better about ourselves, resolved never to let It happen again. This is a film which asks us to contemplate the deeply complicated relationship between rational thought and instinctual feeling via a perverse intermingling of global horror and very, very local pain. It’s not about how fucked-up a few thousand Germans were. It’s about how fucked-up all humans have the potential to be, on small scales and big ones, and the strange paradox that makes it easier to commit a terrible act than it is to live with and honestly grapple with the consequences of it.