The Book Thief

With how often the Holocaust has been portrayed on film, it can be difficult for films such as The Book Thief to find a niche.

Yet that’s not where this big-screen adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Australian author Markus Zusak runs into problems. Rather, it takes a compelling tale of the clash between wartime horrors and childhood innocence, and turns it into a shameless tearjerker.

The film boasts an eye-opening portrayal by young Canadian actress Sophie Nelisse (Monsieur Lazhar), who rises above a script that keeps the pace too deliberate and the lacks a sufficient edge.

In the film, Nelisse portrays Liesel, an adolescent girl living in Germany and trying to adjust to life with her foster parents, Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson), during the rise of the Nazi party.

As an avid reader, the precocious Liesel has a habit of purloining banned books, or borrowing them from a local politician’s wife (Kirsten Block). She befriends a Jewish refugee (Ben Schnetzer) hiding out in her home as well as a neighborhood boy (Nico Liersch) — a sports fan with dreams of becoming the next Jesse Owens — on whom she develops a slight crush.

The film has its heart in the right place with its story of trying to find hope amid unthinkable sadness. It conveys worthwhile if obvious lessons about tolerance and family bonds. Plus, there’s a certain audacity in the film retaining the book’s narration by Death (voiced by Roger Allam), which certainly goes against the crowd-pleasing grain.

Emmy-winning director Brian Percival (TV’s “Downton Abbey”), works from a heavy-handed screenplay by Michael Petroni (The Rite) that suffers from lack of narrative momentum, keeping the film from having its intended cumulative emotional effect. The production values are strong, giving a sense of authenticity to the period re-creation, and the score by Oscar-winning legend John Williams proves a solid fit for the material.

The performances by an international cast in The Book Thief add depth to a story that doesn’t earn the tears it works so hard to drag out of moviegoers. As a result, the true-life atrocities in the subject matter feel more sugarcoated than genuine.

Rated PG-13, 131 minutes.