“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.

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