By Paul Byrnes
How do you take your Holocaust, sweetened or unsweetened? The PG rating, ''mild themes and violence'', might raise suspicions. This is a film about a young girl's life in Germany from 1938 to 1945, during which her brother dies, her mother disappears, the Nazis come looking for the young Jewish man hiding in the cellar, a parade of Jews passes the end of the street en route to or from the death camps - and yet it contains only ''mild themes and violence''?
The book by Australian writer Markus Zusak has sold 8 million copies. The writer's parents came to Australia as German migrants in the 1950s. Zusak's mother, Lisa, is German; his father, Helmut, Austrian. The heroine of this book is Liesel, who is 10 in 1939, as the book opens. Zusak, now 38, wrote the book in his late 20s. He has said his parents were very young during the war, but it is clear that the book is both a tribute to, and a reflection of, their experiences and memories, however richly reimagined. A labour of love, in fact.
The narrator of the story is Death himself, who speaks in a sardonic, weary, humorous tone, tinged with malevolence. I'm not as bad as everyone thinks, he says, but you don't want to argue with me. Death takes an interest in Liesel, when she glimpses him on the train as he comes to take her brother, little Werner, from the arms of her mother. We don't see Death in the film, but he is voiced by the roundly toned English actor Roger Allam.
The book offers a rich torte of themes and stories for the young adult reader, and the film follows these fairly closely. The golden-haired Liesel (Sophie Nelisse) overcomes her illiteracy through the help of her kindly foster father, Hans Hubermann (Geoffrey Rush); she becomes a bookworm and words cover the cellar where Hans and his grumpy dumpling of a wife Rosa (Emily Watson) conceal Max (Ben Schnetzer), whose father saved Hans in World War I. The Hubermanns are not Jewish, just decent folk.
In the village square, the Nazis may be burning books, but here words are sacred and powerful. Liesel, increasingly smitten by the older Max, describes the world outside to him, discovering her own poetic tendencies. As bombs rain down on the community, she becomes the storyteller in the bomb shelter, steadying everyone's nerves.
To some extent, this idea of the power of words is the fault line of the movie. If this idea appeals to you, the movie may touch your heart. If, like me, you find it annoying and shallow, verging on offensive, you might struggle as I did with this undoubtedly well-made and well-meaning film.
Even on its own terms, words do not save anybody in this movie. Stealing books, as Liesel does, merely adds tension to the story, a form of literary buttressing. The film offers an affirming message to the young that learning to read and appreciate books and stories will give you strength to fight the demons of life. I would agree wholeheartedly, except in the context of this story, and this period. In the face of the Nazis, they were hardly enough.
I think both book and film offer a sentimental respite from the very real horrors of that war. It's true that it's not really a film about the Holocaust; it's true that some Germans tried to help Jews and resist the Nazis. It's also true that tackling any story connected with these events requires a duty of seriousness, to show the horror of what was done. The book sugar coats that horror with the story of Liesel's literary blooming. Everyone else may be dead, but she can read.
Turning that into a movie has not lessened the jarring sense of inadequacy. Indeed, the film is probably more sentimental than the book. It's easier to get away with some things on the page. Here we have to endure Liesel actually telling her cloying story in the air-raid shelter, a scene so icky that Death himself might have preferred the bombs.
I don't want to be unfair. The film is generally made with poise and sensitivity by English director Brian Percival, moving up from Downton Abbey. The performances are strong all round, especially the young French-Canadian actress playing Liesel. Rush and Watson make a fine mismatched pair of working-class Germans, caught up in wider events. He is too kind for his own good; she is kinder than she lets on.
Still, there is little reality to the movie and that's partly intentional. It's a fairytale set in dark times, so there is an artificial quality to the sets and the style. It's a teensy bit Harry Potter with its steam trains and snowball fights, trying to walk the line between innocence and horror, as Anne Frank did in her diary. The difference is that she died. The horror was real. She was killed because she was a Jew. Her words didn't save her either. There was no happy ending.
Twitter: @ptbyrnes
THE BOOK THIEF
Directed by Brian Percival
Rated PG, 131 minutes