The Book Thief (2013)

I was avoiding watching this movie for quite a while because I had read the book and knew that it was going to be hard to watch.  I wasn't wrong about that--any movie set in Germany in WWII is going to contain a fair amount of difficult material.  It was not a mistake to wait until I was ready to watch it, but it is a very good movie.

Liesel is a young girl who is adopted by a family after her mother is sent to a concentration camp.  Her situation prior to this has been difficult--her brother dies en route to Berlin and they pull over to the side of the road and bury him there.  Then when she arrives at her new home, her new mother Rosa (Emma Watson) is none-too-welcoming, but her father Hans (Geoffrey Rush) more than makes up for it.  She is illiterate when she arrives, and her new father teaches her to read, which becomes an obsession for her.  She breaks into the mayor's mansion on a regular basis to borrow books to read, returning the one she took on a previous trip before removing another.  Over the years of  the war she becomes not just well read but a good story teller.

The story that is told lacks some of the grittiness of the book--as the war progresses, German citizens are getting less and less food.  Liesel's family talks about starving, but they don't get progressively emaciated.  They hide a Jew for a period of years (which is how we know that Rosa is much better than she first appears) without much difficulty, a feat that few accomplished.  The movie is narrated by death, which is a bit histrionic.  Overall, though, I really liked the movie, which puts me at odds with the critics, but that is nothing new.