***In The Time Of The Book-Burnings-Brain Percival’s The Book Thief  

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/The-Book-Thief_poster.jpg

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Book Thief, Geoffrey Rush, Emma Watson, Sophie Nelisse, directed by Brian Percival, 2013  

When one thinks about Nazi Germany and books in the late 1930s and 1940s one almost always thinks about those frenzied crowds of ordinary citizens, flames flickering in their faces to create an even  more disturbing picture,  hovering over a bonfire as a group, maybe the Nazi youth, or some local SS troops keep adding book fuel to the fire. Tossing all those Jew books, those Enlightenment books, those modernist books to the fires as if an idea once planted can be burned out in such a way. And of course in the film under review, the adaptation from the book, The Book Thief, there is just such scene. But that is only prologue here because what this film is about, or one of the things that it is about, is “stealing” books in order to learn more about the world, or just for the pleasure of reading.   

The plotline here is pretty straight forward once you get past the fact that the grim reaper is the narrator of this one, a narrator who will unfortunately have plenty of close-at hand business before the story is done between the round-up of the local Jews, the deaths of soldiers on the various fronts, and the retaliation bombings by the Allies later in the film. But what interests Brother Death is this one story, this story of a young illiterate orphan girl, Liesel, whose mother, a communist, another group targeted for extinction by the Nazis, has to leave her behind. Leaves her with foster parents, Hans (a good guy from the beginning) and Rosa (who starts out as a grump but warms up to Liesel over time). The main problem early on is for Hans to teach Liesel how to read and thus opening up her universe during the “night of the long knives.”           

Along the way Liesel meets a neighborhood boy, Rudy, and they become fast friends just at that awkward boy meets girl stage with all the puppy love stuff thrown in. During the film Liesel and Rudy become close, close enough for Liesel to eventually tell Rudy about a young Jewish man who Hans and Rosa are hiding in order to repay an old debt (and who is forced to leave after a couple of years in the basement as the authorities start looking for air-raid shelters and whom Liesel will meet again after the war since he survived); who takes Rudy on her adventures to the mayor’s house to “steal” books for her reading pleasure; and helps him overcome the fears of the air-raid shelters when the Allies start their bombing runs to break the German civilian population’s support for Hitler by telling stories. In the end though Brother Death works in strange ways since everybody who Liesel cared about, her foster-parents, Rudy, and other neighborhood people, were killed in an miscalculated bombing attack toward the end of the war. As the film closes and Brother Death sums up his work, work eventually including Liesel who lived to be 90 and to have prospered after the war moving to New York City, he is still baffled by the human experiment. As are we I would add.