Starring: Sophie Nélisse, Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson
In the midst of Nazism, Liesel Meminger (Nélisse) the daughter of a communist is taken from her home to live in a small village. Initially illiterate, Liesel learns to read with the help of her kindly adoptive father (Rush). Developing a voracious love of reading, Liesel comes to hate the book-burning Nazis and helps her new family and neighbours house a runaway Jew named Max (Ben Schnetzer).
Given that when the original novel The Book Thief became a sensation after its publication in 2005, a film adaptation seemed like a fairly likely prospect. In being brought to the screen, The Book Thief is a handsome and sentimental film, but it also showcases a clear flaw that can happen when adapting from literature. The story's abstract and ambitious story causes the film adaptation to resultantly lose focus and come off as unintentionally strange in places.
In part the film seems to be about book-burning, at points it's about defying the Jewish race laws, and then it has moments about the blitz and conscription. Of course on their own, these would be fine but the film picks up and drops disparate threads of plots, leaving not much to focus on. The performances are from a largely non-German cast. Of our leads we have Sophie Nélisse (a French Canadian), Geoffrey Rush (an Australian) and Emily Watson (an Englishwoman). Although this does mean the film strays a little too far from authenticity (not to mention the bizarre switching between English and German, even mid-sentence) there are some good performances to be had.
Still largely unknown, Sophie Nélisse shows promise as a name for the future and is an engaging screen presence. Geoffrey Rush may have the strongest performance of the movie, his personal warmth radiating from the screen whenever he appears and whilst Emily Watson's character arc is extremely truncated (she goes from a dutiful citizen of the Third Reich to rebelling with very little sense of transition) she does okay. Roger Allam may come away from this however with one of the strangest castings in recent film history. He plays the narrator. The narrator is also the literal personification of death.
The film just manages to stay on the right side of tenderness without descending into schmaltz, with the intermingling of innocence and menace displayed in a scene of a children's choir singing a Nazi anthem (lending obvious comparisons to Tomorrow Belongs To Me from Cabaret (1972) even if it lacks some of the nightmarish power of Cabaret's number). John Williams provides a score which despite getting an Oscar nomination is far from his best work and just coasts along with the story.
As a whole, The Book Thief is a decent film and it is attractive and does have some fairly good attempts at settling a very difficult mood and atmosphere to get right. All that's wrong is that it's a film that would probably say the right things, if it knew what exactly it wanted to talk about.
Next time, Liam Neeson is an Air Marshall looking to stop a terrorist attack up amongst the clouds in airplane thriller, Non-Stop.
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