The Book Thief

I have not read this book which by all accounts is really, really good.  The movie, however, is mostly boring with rare moments of beauty.

The Book Thief is about a little girl in pre-WWII Germany named Liesel who is sent to live with a foster family.  It is found out that Liesel cannot read.  She and her foster father begin reading lessons and soon Liesel is obsessed with books to the point that she begins "borrowing" them.  After Kristallnacht, her new family find themselves hiding a young Jewish man named Max in their basement.  Liesel must deal with the advent of war, the Gestapo, bullies, and the affections of the boy next door.

A huge problem I had was with the narration which is delivered by Death.  It's just awful.  One that is never good for a movie is for people to tell you how important the main character is.  We should be shown that otherwise the character can never live up to the hype.  Being told the main character is important is usually a sign of bad writing (definitely the case with The Book Thief).  The screenwriter just doesn't know how to write an important character so they just tell you to take their word for it.  In this movie, Liesel is the only person that has earned the affections of Death and he takes care to check in on her regularly.  She has done nothing exceptional to catch anyone's eye, let alone Death.  The narration also suffers from a writer (I'm not sure if it's the book's or the movie's or both) thinking that their own words are profound.  The result is almost always cloying and pretentious and assuredly not profound. 

There are also pacing issues in The Book Thief.  It just drags for most of its run time.  I'm sure that editor John Wilson has done the best he could with the footage provide to him.  The man edited some great films that could've been tiresome chores if not cut correctly.  This movie, however, just lacks any sort of drive.  It even largely lacks any real tension.  Even when the Gestapo officer searches the basement and the family has had no time to hide Max, the scene is flat and dull and overly long.  I'm reasonably certain that director Brian Percival is just really bad at his job.

One thing that does help the film is John Williams' Oscar nominated score.  Williams is always great.  The man has won five Academy Awards for his music and been nominated 49 times!  His music in The Book Thief provides some of the atmosphere that the filmmaking is sorely lacking.

Many of the actors are really good though.  Geoffrey Rush is phenomenal.  He plays Liesel's new father and he brings warmth and even some humor to the film.  Emily Watson turns in the best performance of the film as Liesel's new mother.  She's a woman who is loud and angry, but it's all a front.  She's actually a big softy with a hard exterior. 

The actors unfortunately are asked to speak in German accents.  Rush and Watson are pretty good, but many of the other actors are really bad at it.  Trouble is that many of the supporting characters are played by German actors who obviously have perfect German accents (that are oddly enough, less thick than those of their non-German co-stars).  The majority of the accents sound like caricatures best suited for comedy work.  For example, Sophie Nélisse, who plays Liesel, goes full on Elmer Fudd turning all her r's into w's.  Because of this, I didn't realize until the movie was hallway through that the boy next door was named Rudy.  I thought she was calling him Woody! (Nélisse gives a fine performance outside of the accent.)  And characters keep speaking in German.  Sometimes single words.  Sometimes entire speeches (with subtitles, of course).  Trouble is that there are rules to filmmaking and according to those rules, whichever language the characters speak in represents the language of the area.  Therefore, English (even horribly accented English) represents German.  So when characters start speaking in actual German, the rules of cinema say that German is a different language than the characters speak.  But it's not!  They live in Germany!  The German then feels very out of place.  It's just another indication that the director is really bad at his job.

The Book Thief isn't terrible, but it's not really worth two hours of your time.  There are much more satisfying films made about the Holocaust and World War II.  Go seek those out.  Or read the book.

4.5 out of 10