The Book Thief

I'll be clear, though it almost goes without saying - The Book Thief is a beautifully-made film. The sets and costumes are of the highest quality, the cutting and cinematography is inventive and well-judged, the music is up to Williams' usual high standards and the acting is superb. Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson are two actors who can do an incredible amount with very little, and act extremely well with silence. The film is in every aspect extremely well-made. 

Yet...I found the film almost entirely soulless. It felt like a book club exercise rather than a sincere exploration of a lesser-seen side of WWII - the perspective of ordinary German citizens. I'm quite glad to see that this is a view shared by a number of prominent reviewers, the film ultimately having very mixed reviews, because to an extent it was confirmation bias - I avoided the book when it became successful because it struck me as a somewhat exploitative easy-mode way of writing for young adults. Write about WWII and a Jew in hiding and all the emotions are already in place: you don't need to think of ways to move an audience or win their sympathies, as it all comes as part of the collective memorialisation culture - as historians have it. 

There are some very beautiful moments that I would consider inspired: the family snowfight in the basement is beautiful, and I very much enjoyed how Hans first gains a modicum of trust from Liesel by calling her 'Your Majesty' with that grim face of his. But by and large there was far too much of the clinical writing-group approach to this. It felt like a list of characters was drawn up and personality traits were listed. Sharp-tongued woman with a heart of gold. Football-loving Aryan kid whose instant and bizarrely forward way of flirting never rings true for a single second. All the sympathetic characters hate Hitler, of course, forced into party rallies, while the ones who seem pro-party are either robotic stormtroopers or the oddly skinny school bully. The burgermeister's wife's story in particular feels like it was started but left hanging - she is established as craving the love of a child because she has lost her son, but the whole thing gets aborted. 

Indeed, there are a lot of things that feel incomplete, and not in a way that suggests an attempt at a realistic world-view in which stories are not neat and tidy, but in one that suggests a rather superficial approach. Liesel thinks of her mother often, but largely gives her up and never mentions her again save when her memory is jogged once. We're expected to feel hopeless as various characters go to situations they're very unlikely to survive, and yet they do, coming home to great happiness and relief and yet no real narrative weight because we don't know what happened to them. And then there's the ending, which could be seen as stark and harrowing but comes over as the writer just running out of ideas. 

I also did not enjoy the conceit of having Death narrate. Not only was it very cheesy, it took realism a few steps further away, and realism is extremely necessary for this kind of story. Similarly, the theme of stealing books, while of course central to the story - being the title and all - it was pushed somewhat too far, and turned into the very unfortunate 'and so this character, being taught to think like a writer because after being coached to come up with some lame-duck similes, grew up to be a famous writer' denouement, which is always going to be awkward. 

Terribly worthy, somewhat overlong and no doubt well-meaning, this didn't have the sincerity or weight of the best war films, and ultimately comes over as less of an exploration of one of the most dramatic and terrible periods of a country's history and more of an attempt to use cultural feelings about that period to sell media.