A new Liesel on life

If you have kids of the eightto-12 variety and are looking for an age-appropriate introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust — and, as a bonus, a pro-reading subplot — then

The Book Thief is for you. Laid out in no-nonsense chronological order and featuring carefully non-graphic portrayals of life in Nazi Germany, the drama, based on Markus Zusak’s 2006 young-adult novel, doesn’t sugarcoat but (probably) won’t traumatize younger viewers. And their elders can appreciate the story from a more mature perspective.

Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse ( Monsieur Lazhar) plays Liesel, an 11-year-old German girl who, as the story opens, is being delivered to foster parents. Her birth mother is a Communist, which was not taken lightly in 1938.

Her new mama and papa are Hans and Rosa Hubermann, played by Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as one of those couples that exists only to prove that opposites do indeed attract, though without any apparent reason.

Hans is tall, gaunt and careworn, and he coaxes the timid Liesel into their lives with the gentleness one shows toward a wounded fawn. He calls his wife “my ray of sunshine” as though trying to convince himself.

Rosa is rounder and more voluble, though she does most of her swearing in German to protect the PG rating. (The film, like the book, is one of those in which everyone speaks English for the benefit of North American audiences, while throwing in the odd nein or danke to remind us where we are.)

In addition to bonding with her new father, Liesel becomes friends with her classmate Rudy, played by Nico Liersch, who is both a fine young actor and one of the few bona fide Germans in the cast. She also finds herself sharing a room with Max (Ben Schnetzer), a Jewish refugee whose father saved Hans’ life in the last war.

Just about everyone in the film has a lovely, subversive side. Rudy’s hero is Jesse Owens, the African-American athlete who took home four gold medals and one Hitler stink-eye at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Max has a copy of Mein Kampf that he whitewashes and then gives to Liesel to use as a journal. He also enjoys Hitler jokes. Hans shelters Max because that’s what any moral human being living in Nazi Germany would do.

And Liesel steals books. Compulsively though hardly habitually, it must be said. Her first “find” is an odd one, The

Grave Diggers Handbook, from which Hans teaches her to read. The basement becomes a kind of dictionary as Liesel fills its walls with the words she learns. Later, when it’s no longer safe to keep him aboveground, Max will take up residence in this prolix dungeon.

Liesel’s second theft happens while attending a book-burning in the public square, when she rescues a singed copy of The Invisible Man, hiding it under her coat. (Hans notices something amiss when the little girl appears to be literally smoking.) She also finds a patron in Isla, the mayor’s wife, whose private library appears to Liesel’s wide eyes to be of Alexandrian dimensions.

The Book Thief, like its literary source material, is narrated by Death (Roger Allam), who is kind but blunt. “One small fact,” he begins. “You’re going to die.” He’s less of a presence than in the book, but a useful reminder that all tales end sadly if we follow them long enough. And so we follow her through the war years. The movie cannot hope to duplicate the book’s wonderful turns of phrase, in which a gunshot “clipped a hole in the night.” Or this one: “Hans Hubermann had Liesel by one hand. Her small suitcase had her by the other.”

But it manages some images that are by turns beautiful and frightening, as when the brutal pogrom known as Kristallnacht is contrasted with a choir of German schoolchildren singing a racist hymn — angelic voices delivering the devil’s dispatch.

Nélisse is excellent as our innocent avatar; her expansive eyes manage to convey a morality that is somehow both blank and shrewd. She’s aware of the growing barbarity around her, but equally mindful that to accept it would be to lose some vital part of herself.

The Book Thief was adapted by Michael Petroni and directed by Brian Percival, best known for helming several episodes of TV’s Downton Abbey, including an Emmy winner. It does not overreach in its storytelling, but neither does it overplay the connections between language and power that lurked at the heart of the Nazi regime. It simply turns the equation around, celebrating instead the power of language to heal. ∫≈∫