The Book Thief
The brute facts of the Second World War in Germany—Nazi oppression, hunger, people hiding in basements—have been turned into a pleasantly meaningless tale of good-heartedness, complete with soft lyrical touches and a whimsical appearance, as a narrator, by Death, who should have laid this movie to rest.
Film adaptations have a way of toying with the affections of book fans, sometimes shining a light on both insights and flaws that readers may have overlooked.
The film version of The Book Thief is no exception. Brian Percival’s handsome direction of Markus Zusak’s beloved novel does an eloquent job telling the story of Liesel (Sophie Nélisse), a young girl struggling to make sense of the world during the Holocaust. The film, narrated by Death (voiced by Roger Allam), powerfully reminds us that all humans, no matter how important they think they are, die.
But the film’s unwavering focus on Liesel puts an uncomfortably soft, even at times cheery coming-of-age spin on too much of the tale, rendering a backdrop of concentration camps, torture and murder all too far away, if not disconcertingly unimaginable.
The film tenderly portrays Liesel’s journey from illiteracy to someone with a passion for books. That parallels her transformation from scared child to a caring and courageous young woman. Painterly portraits of empty, frozen, white expanse in the opening scenes give way to a library of vibrantly colored tomes that offer a portal to a wonderland of possibilities.
Pretty visuals give an unexpectedly painful twist to other parts of the story.
It’s hard not to hear echoes of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” as cherry-red Nazi flags fly gaily in the breeze or when people toss censored books in the public bonfire and look the other way when Jewish neighbors are ripped brutally from their homes and sent to likely deaths.
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