If The Book Thief lifts a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, is that a win-win? What if she steals a lamp to read by? Does that make her The Lighting Thief? :rimshot: I kid. I kid ‘cuz we got more Nazis. Has any group in history proved more fun-lovin’ and go-with-it? I think not.
Our narrator is Death (voice of Roger Allam). I liked Death. I wish we had him cover some books on tape, too: “Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams. Read by Death …” When Death is your narrator through Nazi Germany, you expect atrocity, don’t you? The Book Thief is surprisingly light on genocide and war crime. What it has a lot of is living children. Before we re-imagine a kinder, gentler Third Reich, do remember this is a movie (mostly) about Germans. Nazis are supposed to be kind to their own. I think.
Death introduces “dirty Communist” Liesel (Sophie Nélisse) by killing her younger brother on the train to go live with her foster parents. OK, not all the children live. At the makeshift funeral, Liesel lifts a gravedigger’s manual. Despite an inability to read, she is fascinated with the written word. Then she gets put on the spot at school; very next scene shows a group of children has encircled her in the yard all shouting, “dummkopf.” (“Unt zis is how ve say ‘Hello’ in Germany …”) I’m pretty sure Liesel’s reading fascination would have bloomed even without this negative 
reinforcement. She’s the only one in town interested in using a public book burning as a lending library.
Geoffrey Rush is back, which means it must be Oscar time. He and Emily Watson play Liesel’s foster parents. Rush gets to play good cop; stepmother Heike is about as warm as a Düsseldorf funeral in January. Liesel also acquires a boytoy (Nico Liersch) upon arrival — ah, some things are universal. Nazi Germany, a filthy Communist import come to live, a war going on, and yet the new girl still captures the boy next door. So cliché. Speaking of cliché, Book Thief goes through the standard war film paces — hiding a fugitive, dearth of supplies, loss of childhood innocence — well, sort of. We go through a bunch of the childhood standards here: hazing, mild defiance, the development of an interest, a secret or two, all with Nazi flair.
The Book Thief isn’t a bad film bad any means, quite the opposite in fact. Rush is endearing and it’s mildly refreshing to follow a German family who isn’t wild about the war. Problem is it will remind you of a great many better and more intense films — The Pianist, Inglorious Basterds, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to name a few. Death here gets more action as narrator than anywhere else (a rarity for this subject matter). You get the feeling that this thing is just pushing for awards without really deserving any.
A Nazi flick a little short on bleed
Orphan girl in great deal of need
A lesson on paucity
To stop atrocity
You should never learn how to read
Rated PG-13, 131 Minutes
D: Brian Percival
W: Micjael Petroni
Genre: Nazi-lite
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Anne Frank
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Nazis. Always the Nazis.
