Awful mess with good actors trying to save the film

Rating: 3/10 (7 February 2015)

I was really fooled by the good score here on IMDb. 7,6 is way off in my eyes. It's a beautiful film. That means sets are good, but maybe it's too flavored with vanilla sugar the whole thing. Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson are doing their best to save this, and the two main kids are doing a great job. But this film fails on almost all other levels.
It's all ruined by badly written dialog., with awful German-English accent, awful over-play, horrible direction, pretentious narrative voice, convoluted classic music score and plain silly ideas. I t doesn't help that German word are spit into the badly spoken English. "Sauermesch", "ja", "Nein", "Frau"... come on!
Keep away form future films made by Brian Percival. He should keep himself to cheap TV- productions.