Great Story and Acting -- Overfull Script

Rating: 7/10 (22 November 2013)

THE BOOK THIEF is a movie full of great incidents and characters, top production values and fine acting -- Geoffrey Rush is one of those actors I believe cannot give a less than brilliant performance and Emma Watson creeps into your heart slowly and steadily throughout. The story is telling and surprisingly hopeful in the end.
Unhappily, this is not a great movie and the problem can be laid squarely at the feet of the scriptwriter. Based, as it is, on a book, the first problem lies in how to translate ideas into images and what to cut without losing the movie's heart. Michael Petroni has succeeded admirably in the former endeavor, but has not been entirely successful in the latter. Roger Allam's narration of the story as Death is well performed, but ultimately pompous and a cheat.
I have not read the book this movie is based on, but it seems likely to me that the narration attempts to replicate the third person omniscient narrator of the book. Sometimes it is the details like this that endear a book to us, but the translation from one medium to another requires great care and narration is rarely a good idea in a movie. The attempt by narration to make the conditions of the movie simultaneously universal and of great individual importance is miscalculated. It may work in the book. It does not work on the screen.
This is a movie I took great pleasure in while in the theater. As I said, the acting and attention to detail are compelling. However, the scriptwriter was apparently too fond of the least cinematic parts of the book and the entire movies suffers thereby. It's still compelling, but far less than it might have been.