Long Overdue

Rating: 6/10 (9 February 2015)

***SPOILERS*** Based on Markus Zusak's best seller-230 weeks on the NY Times Best Seller list- by the same name "The Book Thief" starts out with little Liesel Meminger, Sophie Nelisse, on her way to see her new adopted parents Hans & Rosa Hubermann, Geoffrey Rush & Emily Waston, in the little Southern German town of Mulching. That's after Liesel's sickly kid brother died on his way there from pneumonia. Liesel's birth parents were arrested and sent to a concentration camp for being members of the communist party a crime in Nazi Germany. It takes a while for Liesel to adopt to her new surroundings and her life in school is a total disaster in her being illiterate. It's by learning to read and reading books that she gains confidence in herself as well as having her classmate the very Aryan-blond hair and blue eyed-looking Rudy Steiner played by Nico Liersch, who idealizes the great 1930's African/American track and field Olympic champion Jesse Owens, having the hots for her.
It's when Liesel brought the town's Burgermeister's very well read wife Ilsa, Barbara Auer, her laundry that she hit pay-dirt in her giving her access to her library and allowing her to take out her books and read then, without a return or due date, as long as she wanted to. This had Liesel educate herself and becomes an honor student in no time at all. But with a war, WWII, going on at full blast things soon get a bit out of hand for Liesel and her parents to deal with. It turned out that the son of the man-Jewish Sgt.Erik Vandenburg- who saved Hanss life in WWI in the Battle of Flanders Fields the sick and sniffling Max Vandenburg, Ben Schnetzer, showed up unexpectedly one night begging Hans & Rosa to hide him from the Nazis who are out to arrest and very possibly, at the local concentration camp, do him in! This can put the Hubermann's if it's found out that they took Max in to be put on the notorious Nazi sh*t list that's like a death sentence. That if they ever discover that they were hiding a Jew and thus end up being sent to a concentration camp along with him.
With the Nazis in danger of finding him Max, who's suffering from malnutrition and sleep deprivation, now on the verge of death anyway decides to leave the safety of the Hubermann's home and go out on his own, in Nazi Germany, to spare them any more, in looking after him, suffering. By now both Liesel and Rudy had developed a puppy love relationship and the war was the farthest thing on their minds. That's until the little town Mulching was hit by a devastating 1,000 plane allied bombing raid and wiped out Liesel's entire adopted family as well as her now full-time boyfriend Rudy Steiner. The film moves two years into the future-1945-where we see Mulching liberated by units of the US 3Rd Army with Liesel alive and well there to greet and cheer them on. We later see that in the future, sometime in the late 1990's with her owning an Apple Computer, Liesel grew up and became a big success in the art antique and collectible world and it was her love of books that made that all possible. Were told all this by non other then Mister Death, Roger Allam, himself who on and off, with an occasional coffee break, narrated to movie.
P.S What struck me is the running for his life from the Nazis Max Vanderburg appearance at the very end of the film! He in fact looked fit as a fiddle as a lot better and far more healthier, with roses in his cheeks, after spending some two or three years in a Nazi concentration or death camp! Then when he was, on the point of death, while free and taken care of by the kind and loving Hubermann's! In fact it had me wonder that if the Nazis did find out that the Hubermann's were harboring a Jew or fugitive in their house they may well have survived the war with Max if they ended up in a concentration camp along with him!