The theater also showed a 3-minute short, "Porsche", about making a model of the car from ice.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
"The Book Thief" gives a look at civilian life in Nazi Germany, and as to what made people tick
“The Book Thief”, by Brian Perival, based on the novel by Markus
Zusak (and Australian who seems quite young for such subject matter), renders a
close up look at what it was like to live as a Gentile in Nazi Germany before
and during World War II, and it gives some insight into why people thought and
behaved the way they did.
A young girl Liesel (Sophe Nelisse), adopted with her
brother by a kindly shoemaker Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and his wife in the mid
1930s, helps shelter (after “Crystal
Night”) a very appealing young Jewish man Max (Bem Schnetzer), who seems sickly
at first but gradually regains strength after a couple of close calls. The Nazi establishment gradually lowers the
boom on private citizens, making them attend patriotic rallies outdoors in the
town square and then inspecting homes and basements.
One gets the impression that the people
really believed that they had to hang together to survive and then prosper in a
world of “enemies”. Yet, Hans and his
family (with Emily Watson) quickly realize there is something that doesn’t make
sense about the rampant anti-Semitism.
The patriotic songs are telling. One is the song of “National
Socialism”, and another is based on the slow movement of one of Joseph Haydn’s
string quartets.
Liesel has learned to read from her adoptive father, who has
written part of a dictionary on the basement wall. Max enhances her love of learning, saying
that what distinguishes a living from an inert thing is just a word. Today, we
would say that is DNA. Liesel takes to “stealing”
books from a local burger’s home. Maybe
there’s no public library, where “it’s free”.
Eventually, war comes to their town, which is bombed and
destroyed, leaving the people to rebuild their lives like everyone else after
liberation by the Allies.
The film, from Baselberg Studios, is released under the regular
20th Century Fox trademark than Searchlight, which is more commonly
used for overseas-sourced films. Nevertheless, this first weekend, the film is
showing mostly in “arthouses”. I saw it
at the Angelika Mosaic in Merrifield, VA before an almost sold-out Sunday
afternoon crowd in a big auditorium.
The official site is here.
The rather gentled original music score is by John
Williams. The narrator is Roger Allam,
and the film opens and closes with images clouds from above.
The theater also showed a 3-minute short, "Porsche", about making a model of the car from ice.
The theater also showed a 3-minute short, "Porsche", about making a model of the car from ice.
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