The Book Thief

SPOILERS

I really enjoyed the book The Book Thief, so I didn't really expect the film adaptation to be very good. That's usually the way. But in some ways it is good. Not completely though.

In the book having Death as the narrator is very clever. It's an idea that works surprisingly well given the setting of Germany during WWII. The film tries to keep true to this, but narration in films is notoriously tricky. We get a flavour of Death, but it is very superficial compared to the book. I think it just about works. Much as I like Roger Allam as an actor, his voice is nothing like what I imagined Death to be like from the book, which is probably the case for a lot of people. He sounds far too kind. Death has to be a bit grimmer, doesn't he? That's why his interest in Liesel is so unusual and intriguing.

One thing the film does do very well is capturing the setting. Use of common German words and a decent smattering of Germanic accents adds a lot. Emily Watson and Geoffrey Rush are very strong as Mr and Mrs Hubermann. Sophie Nélisse is a great find and a perfect Liesel. Her relationship with Nico Liersch's deliberately slightly annoying Rudy is somewhat downplayed for a lot of the film which makes the tragedy near the end a bit less dramatic than it should be.

Obviously there's a lot left out in the film. I felt that the tone of the film was a lot lighter than the book. Herr Hubermann's decision not to join The Party was only mentioned in passing once, I think. Apart from the book-burning rally, the Nazis didn't seem very frightening. Some of the persecution scenes just didn't seem to work for me.

I did enjoy the film though. The story is fairly true to the book and the cast carry off the characters very well. The ending is paradoxically both happy and sad.