![]() ![]() ![]() But though the characters here age from 13 to 17 during the story, at the end they look exactly like the barely pubescent kids they were when it started, and the troubling excitements of eros never arise. In a different, more reality-based movie, their relationship would be a coming-of-age romance. Our heroine's bookishness, meanwhile, is mainly a source of bemusement to Rudy (Nico Liersh), the flaxen-haired neighbor boy who befriends and dotes on her. And of course, the Nazis hate books, as they demonstrate by burning a heap in the town square. Here's another: How is it that Liesel, mocked by her new schoolmates for being illiterate, quickly morphs not just into a reader but one so adept and voracious that she's soon swiping books from the local burgermeister's library? (This valorization of reading is a transparent come-on in many books aimed at young readers.) Whatever its source, her newfound passion is one she shares with Max ( Ben Schnetzer), a young Jewish guy the kindly couple hide in their basement. Was the girl's mom, as is hinted, a communist? Why would this couple, who barely have enough to eat, take in an unknown child to care for? Such are the questions the movie ignores as it gallops along to history's accelerating drumbeat. Soon after, Mom vanishes over the horizon and Liesel is taken in by a good-hearted provincial couple, kindly Hans ( Geoffrey Rush) and crusty-but-lovable Rosa ( Emily Watson). When Death first introduces her, in 1938, she is on the run with a fugitive mother and a little brother who dies in the first scene. The center of that fiction is Liesel ( Sophie Nelisse), one of those spunky young heroines that keep the Young Adult industry afloat. What's the Grim Reaper doing here, besides nudging along the exposition and dropping ironic bon mots? Obviously, he serves a purpose much akin to that of the movie's impeccably costumed but barely differentiated Nazis: to attempt giving some thematic ballast to a tale so wispy and ungrounded that otherwise it might float away. This is the movie, after all, that's narrated by Death, a device that you can imagine possibly working in a Hollywood film of the '30s or '40s, but hardly since. Other adults, though, are more apt to find the proceedings an occasion for fits of squirming and eye-rolling. Like a kid-friendly mulch of elements cribbed from "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "Slaughterhouse-Five," the film conceivably could play well to an audience of 12-year-olds and their grandparents. If you go to a bookstore looking for Markus Zusak's novel, the movie's source, you're likely be directed to the Young Adult or Teen Fiction sections, which explains a lot about the movie's appeal, and lack thereof. ![]()
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