Goofs for
The Reader (2008) More at IMDbPro »

• Anachronisms: When Michael exits his taxi in 1988 New York, modern cars and SUVs can be seen in the background.
  
  
• Anachronisms: During the NYC 1988 sequence, the MetLife building is visible in several shots. It was the Pan Am building at that time.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In a scene set in 1958, the protagonist reads aloud from Robert Fagles' translation of the Odyssey, which wasn't published until 1996. The text used in the German dubbed version on the other hand is the classical and still popular translation of 1781 by Johann Heinrich Voß (also spelled Voss), which perfectly matches the chronology. Thus this can be seen as a special effect of using (sometimes contemporary) English books instead of historic German ones as props and sources for the reading sequences.
  
  

• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: In one scene Michael ("the kid") is walking around the concentration camp alone. One of the shots is taken at night time. While Auschwitz is not open to the public in the evening, the movie never states what concentration camp Michael visits, but in the novel it is established that it is not Auschwitz because a visa would take too long to acquire. For this same reason it is not meant to represent the Majdanek camp near Lublin, which was actually used as location for these scenes.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the closing credits listing the cast, the roles of actors portraying the prosecuting attorney and defense attorney are stated as prosecuting council and defense council. One acting as an attorney or legal representative is a counsel, not council. A council is a body of people like a committee or administrative body.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the second Auschwitz Trial (December 1963-August 1965) there was no women.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Hanna teaches herself to read and write though library books. Yet, her handwriting is in the style of "penmanship" handwriting, for certain letters, not as they are written in books. The main example of this is the lowercase "a" - she writes it the way most people write it, not as it is printed in books, which is how she would have learned it. However, in the movie when Hanna first begins to learn to write while reading "The Lady with the Little Dog", it is shown that the lowercase "a" in her copy of the book is not printed in "penmanship" font, i.e. printed in a font much like the way most people write (such as Arial).
  
  
• Anachronisms: Also in the 1988 New York scene, the pedestrian Walk/Don't Walk traffic lights are the current man/hand type. In 1988, they would be the old type that spelled out Walk/Don't Walk.
  
  
• Factual errors: Michael is diagnosed with scarlet fever at the beginning of the film. The doctor states it would take him several months to heal, which would be true, had antibiotics not been discover and made into bacteria treatments 13 years earlier. Even then, scarlet fever does not take that long to heal in a healthy 15-year-old. In the book he has hepatitis, which would have a long recovery period.
  
  
• Continuity: When Older Michael first gets into his car, it is completely covered with dew or raindrops. In the following scene, the car is totally dry.
  
  
• Continuity: When visiting Ilena in NYC, Michael says he remembers her from the trial "almost twenty years ago." However from the time-lines given in the film, it is easy to calculate that it was 22 years previously.
  
  
• Anachronisms: Michael wraps the cassette tapes he is sending Hanna in contemporary thin foam wrapping paper which was not available in the 1970s.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In a 1976 scene, the Calculator seen on the desk when Michael is reading "The Odyssey" at night is presumably an OEM-Version of the Casio LC-403B. This calculator came on the market around 1985.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In one scene, taken in the bathing/tub area, there appears to be a modern day plastic water bottle on the small table in the background. The light is quite dim, but the shape is somewhat unmistakable.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When Hanna first taught herself to read "The Lady With The Little Dog", she circled out the first word "The" from the title, then followed with all other "the"s in the whole page including the "the"s not starting with a capital "t". However, the word "the" appears twice in the title visible on the first page of the book, so she has a model for both forms.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: In the opening scene the camera/cameraman covered in black can be seen in the reflection in the top of the teaspoon.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In one of the last shots of the movie, there seems to be an Ikea Lillberg sofa (the one with with Froarp black/white cushions and a birch frame).
  
  
• Anachronisms: When Michael runs from school to Hannah on his first day back in school, he runs into some school boys in the yard. One of the boys is giving him a rude hand gesture which was not in use during this time. This gesture turns up on German school grounds in the 1980s.
  
  
• Continuity: The boy Michael (David Kross) is left-handed and wears his watch on the right. The adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) is right-handed with his watch worn on the left.
  
  
• Continuity: When Michael visits Hanna in prison, when they're sitting at the table talking, Hanna's eye color is a milky blue for a while, and then it shows Michael, then it goes back to a Hanna with brown eyes.
  
  
• Anachronisms: When Michael is making the tapes, we see a notebook where he lists his recordings between 4 August 77 and 10 October 77. One of the entries is: Heinrich Böll, Women in a River Landscape. This novel was first published in 1985, so Michael couldn't have possibly read it in 1977. (Someone probably confused this title with another novel of Böll's, "Group Portrait With Lady", about the life of a woman born in 1922, which came out in 1970 and was very well received and popular at the time.)
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Nearly all the books seen in the film are in English, although they represent German books. We can accept this as artistic license, but then we would expect consistency: all the visible text in the film should be English. However, a police car is clearly marked "POLIZEI". Why should the books be translated into English and not the marking on the police car?
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): (In the French version) The name Michael Berg is pronounced in the American way, instead of the German way.
  
  

• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: SPOILER: Some viewers have been confused about the timeline of the events in the film, but they are not goofs. Hanna had been a concentration camp guard in the latter part of World War II (1939-1945). Hanna and Michael meet in West Germany, 1958, when Michael is 15 years old. In 1966, Michael is a law student and observes Hanna's trial (for events which took place in 1944). Finally, Ralph Fiennes portrays the older Michael who visits Hanna in 1988.
  
  

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