Sort of a young-adult version of “The Reader,’’ the low-key, English-language coming-of-age drama “The Book Thief’’ centers on an illiterate teenager caught up in the horrors of Nazi Germany.
Liesel Meminger — played with spunky charm by French-Canadian newcomer Sophie Nelisse — is a German Lutheran girl whose mother has been sent to a concentration camp in 1938 for alleged Communist activities.
When her younger brother dies on a train trip en route to their new foster home, 9-year-old Liesel instinctively compensates for her losses by grabbing a book that’s been dropped at his burial place — “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.’’
Her kindly new father, Hans Hubermann (the always-excellent Geoffrey Rush), begins teaching Liesel to read — and she snatches a smoldering copy of H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man’’ out of a huge pile of banned books being burned in the square of the small town where the Hubermanns live.
It’s not easy portraying Nazis in a PG-13 film without it coming off like “The Sound of Music,’’ even when Liesel is obliged to wear a Hitler Youth uniform. (Hans, a painter, is mostly unemployed because he refuses to join the Nazi party.) I particularly felt the depiction of the notorious Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews erred on the side of tastefulness in this US-German co-production.
But “The Book Thief’’ — based on an internationally best-selling novel by Markus Zusak, an Australian of German-Austrian descent, that’s been described as “Harry Potter and the Holocaust’’ — gains dramatic traction when the Hubermanns hide a Jew in their cramped basement for two years.
Max Vanderberg (Ben Schnetzer, a charismatic New Yorker) is the son of a man who saved Hans’ life in World War I, and even Hans’ endlessly nagging wife, Elsa (a solid Emily Watson), a laundress whose good heart is well-disguised, agrees it’s a debt that needs to be repaid, no matter the risk.
Liesel bonds platonically with 20-something Max over their mutual love of books, even as she develops a crush on neighbor Rudy (Nico Liersch), to whom she perhaps unwisely confides the family’s dangerous secret.
The other significant character is the bürgermeister’s wife (Barbara Auer), who lets Liesel sneak into her late son’s private library to indulge her passion for reading.
Director Brian Percival (“Downton Abbey’’) and screenwriter Michael Petroni have chosen to have their film narrated by Death (Roger Allam) — a device that worked better in Zusak’s novel, even if it does effectively warn audiences that some of the characters will not survive the war.
“The Book Thief’’ would also have been better off without a self-congratulatory coda set in present-day Manhattan. But overall, it’s engaging and serves its young audience well — a rare Holocaust movie that doesn’t strain to become Oscar bait.