How would Lubitsch have done it?

Rating: 2/10 (14 January 2014)

There's a mainstream middle-brow type of writing and film (music too) which was what the Nouvelle Vague in the 50s called the 'Cinema de Papa', that is to say, it is thoroughly conventional. It tends to platitudes, to echo the views and moral perspectives of the very average. Tradition is not a bad thing, not on its own, yet with a film like The Book Thief, it goes over much repeated material in a form which is so well known as to induce narcolepsy.
While the film is comprised of a number of much adored clichés, especially as it deals with this historical period, it assembles them as pure kitsch.
The world is viewed through the eyes of a child, her parents are forbidding, her father kindly, almost like fairy tale father; the historical and social fabric is rendered in simplistic reductive episodes and the script delivers such gems as, "A human doesn't have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both." That is not writing – it's Barbara Cartland. It's the sort of drivel book clubs consume, with its hallmark card insight and ladles of sentiment.
The film proceeds at a solemn pace, suggestive of its deeply human feeling, which means we have to endure two non German actors use something like an anemic Germanic accent with added inflections as though they might come from the shtetl. Other characters are similarly afflicted with shifts between some real German and then awkward accented dialog. Why someone says 'Nein' then continues talking in English is like the muddled logic of a 1960s Disney movie.
Billy Wilder was known to have a sign in his office that read, "How would Lubitsch have done it?" It was a check for him, a guide, to find that course of action that was right and sharp. It is true to say that both Wilder and Lubtsich would have passed on, or rewritten, The Book Thief. It is a banal piece of work.