I finally saw this war drama, which I don't think had a wide theatrical release, and fell madly in love. It's not what I expected, and it's not really an original landmark, but it's really, truly lovely. Especially notable is John Williams's score, which skillfully heightens the drama without drawing much attention to itself (a feat John Williams has not been able to do in his frequent Spielberg collaborations).
We follow young Liesel (Sophie Nelisse), adopted into a German family as the Nazis rise to power. Over the course of four years, she learns fear, bravery, and love through her experiences, and, perhaps most importantly, she learns to read. Taught by her foster father (Geoffrey Rush), she actively learns to read and write on her basement walls before creatively spinning tales of her own to comfort the shaken community during air raids. Though integrated into the Hitler Youth, Liesel remains curious and open-minded: She deliberately reads books after seeing the Nazis burn them, and she quickly befriends and protects Max, a Jewish refugee hiding in her home.
I have several reasons for liking this film, and most of them are purely reactionary. By that, I mean I don't have a lot of high-brow Thoughts about The Book Thief, because it is almost shockingly simple and sweet in its delivery. It seems to have no grand delusions of its own importance (which makes it profoundly important, I might add), and indeed it often feels like a child's fantasy. Gentle and even whimsical, the film runs to a slow pace and a palpable heartbeat. That's not to say it is trivial or unsentimental; it is certainly weighted with its thematic content and the contexts of racial, gendered, political, social, and intellectual oppression of Nazi Germany. One of the main discussion points for me is the voice-over narrator (Roger Allam), who represents Death. This is a fantastic concept, a relatively original cinematic device, and a complicated rhetorical move in an otherwise optimistic film, all wrapped up into one.
Though danger and death threaten our protagonists at every turn, nothing seems to quench Liesel's hope, which sometimes makes this film feel a bit like a re-imagining of Anne Frank's famous narrative. Indeed, Liesel's ultimate penning of a diary makes the film more of a comedy in the traditional sense of the word (in which the plot is generally hopeful, or "upward", rather than "downward", as in a tragedy). The greatest warmth and charm of the film are provided by Geoffrey Rush in his typical brilliance, though his character's wife (played perfectly by Emily Watson) brings her own big-hearted presence to the tale.
Director Roger Allam, though, deserves the most credit for this venture. His undeterred efforts to make the film hopeful and warm pay off magnificently in just about every scene. He smartly shows us an awful possibility -- hints at the worst of what we could imagine -- and then allows his characters to persevere, which makes the results of each scene almost as shocking as the horrors we might otherwise expect, but in a positive way. Make no mistake, this is a wartime drama. But there is very little violence, no battle sequence, and even the deaths of main characters (I'm really not spoiling anything, I promise) aren't really devastating. All in all, The Book Thief is one of the most unpredictable dramas I've ever seen, and its sentimental heart never succumbs to melodrama. It's just beautiful.
IMDb: The Book Thief
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