The Book Thief

One Of The Best Movies I've Ever Seen
Note: I saw an advanced screening of The Book Thief.

The Book Thief is a book that has stuck with me for so many years, there is just something so powerful and raw about Zusak's novel. The Book Thief has to be one of the trickiest books to adapt because it's far from a simple story. The novel is nearly 600 pages and it's main narrator is Death himself commenting on the events of World War II. How could Brian Percival (Downton Abbey) direct such a movie without doing the novel injustice?

The Book Thief is true to it's source material, even though it doesn't maintain all of the major plot events in the novel. The filmmakers rarely utilized Death's narration, so the few times they did use it, it felt a bit awkward and out of place. I didn't get quite the chills from hearing his narration like I did when I had read the book. Despite the unevenness of the narration, The Book Thief really captures the essence of Liesel's story. All of the characters were truly...

"I am haunted by humans"
Those who love Markus Zusak's The Book Thief as I do will know that it is an incredibly complex novel - the way the main characters intersect each other's lives and the themes that are developed throughout the novel are deep and layered and would make for a daunting on-screen translation. Yet director Brian Percival manages to make the movie accessible to viewers whilst staying true to the source material. This may not be a blow-by-blow, faithful to each and every word adaptation, but to me at least, it is a true adaptation in portraying the essence of the story. I love the book but I also loved the movie, for similar and different reasons.

The story of The Book Thief begins with the narrator, Death (Roger Allam), providing a sort of overview/introduction. Fortunately, the narrator's voice is not dominant throughout the story as it would (to me) have been a rather distracting voice, but the narrator's presence is felt nevertheless. The protagonist in this film is Liesel...

A strangely lyrical young girl's coming of age tale, set in Nazi Germany and narrated by Death
All too often a movie turns out to be less than what the trailers lead you to expect, but every now and then there's a movie that surprises you by being more. The Book Thief is one of those movies. Directed by Brian Percival (Downton Abbey, North & South) from a screenplay by Michael Petroni (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) adapted from the novel of the same name by Marcus Zusak, The Book Thief does not lend itself to easy categorization. On the surface, you'd think from the trailers that it's an Anne Frank sort of film, a young girl's POV about life under the Nazis and about a family hiding a young Jewish man in their house. But it's more than that, a lot more.

You know you're in for something different when the film begins with the narrated line "Here's a small fact: you're going to die." You know you're in for something really different when you realize that the narrator is Death. And it is Death who introduces us to Liesel...

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