The Book Thief is a movie about a girl who lives through the Holocaust and finds solace in books. It is also a movie that spends nearly three hours telling you that reading is wonderful and that words can save lives. Neither of those ideas is wrong, but neither of them is served by a script this slow and heavy-handed.
Based on Markus Zusak’s novel, the film follows Liesel Meminger (Sophie Nélisse), a young girl living in Nazi Germany whose family takes in a Jewish refugee named Max (Ben Schnetzer). Her foster parents, Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa Hubermann (Emily Watson), are kind but poor, and Liesel’s life is defined by grief, fear, and the constant threat of discovery. The book she steals from her school’s burned books pile becomes a talisman, a way to hold onto something beautiful in a world that is not.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
The Long Pace
The problem starts with pacing. The film runs nearly three hours, and it moves like a train moving through wet mud. Scenes that should last minutes stretch into ten or fifteen. Liesel’s first theft of a book, her friendship with Rudy Steiner (Nico Lanz), and the political terror of the era all get the same slow, deliberate treatment, and the cumulative effect is exhaustion, not dread.
The director, Brian Percival, directs with a soft, painterly eye, and the cinematography is often lovely. But beauty alone cannot carry a story this weighed down. The film is so intent on making every moment count that it forgets to let the audience breathe.
Nélisse and Rush Carry It
The performances are the film’s saving grace. Sophie Nélisse plays Liesel with a quiet intensity that never tips into precociousness. She is a child who understands the stakes of her world without ever losing her sense of wonder, and that balance is rare in young actors. Geoffrey Rush is excellent as Hans, a man who cannot bear to hit his wife or his daughter, who hides Jews in his basement, and who reads aloud to his family as if the act itself were a form of resistance. Their scenes together are the best the film has to offer, a father and daughter finding comfort in each other during a nightmare.
The rest of the cast is solid but less memorable. Emily Watson is fine as Rosa, the sharp-tongued mother who hides her love behind insults. Nico Lanz is pleasant as Rudy, the boy who loves Liesel and hates the regime. Ben Schnetzer is adequate as Max, though the film struggles to find a shape for him beyond his status as a hidden Jew.
“The best thing you can do is read words.”
The Words Themselves
The film’s central idea is that words matter. Liesel’s foster father reads to her, and she learns to read herself, and both acts become acts of rebellion. That is a powerful concept, and the film tries to make it feel urgent. It fails, mostly because the film never explains why the Nazis hate books or why literacy itself becomes a crime. The threat feels vague, a backdrop rather than a driving force.
The film also leans heavily on a narrator who is Death, voiced by Patrick Frazer. This device works better in the novel, where it is a framing device that adds weight. On screen, it feels intrusive, a voiceover that tells you what you are seeing rather than letting you see it. The narration is full of poetic lines about the nature of mortality, but it rarely deepens the story. It just makes the pacing worse.
Where It Falls Short
The Book Thief is not a bad film. It is just a dull one, a film that is so convinced of its own importance that it cannot find room for urgency. The Holocaust is a subject that demands restraint, and this film shows none. It piles on sentiment, repeating the same lessons about love and courage and hope until they lose their power.
The ending is a case in point. After two hours of slow build, the final scenes rush to tie everything together, and the result is a resolution that feels rushed and hollow. The film has spent so long establishing its world that it cannot spend enough time resolving it.
Key Facts Box
- Title: The Book Thief
- Director: Brian Percival
- Release year: 2013
- Runtime: Nearly three hours
- Lead actress: Sophie Nélisse
- Score: 5.3/10
The Book Thief is a noble failure. It means well, and it is anchored by strong performances, especially from Nélisse and Rush. But it is a film that mistakes sincerity for insight, and a film that mistakes length for depth. It is a worthy attempt at a difficult subject, but it is a slow, plodding one. The book it is based on is beloved for a reason, and this adaptation does not capture that reason.
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