The Holocaust drama “White Bird” is a sensitive, well-intentioned, but ultimately rather programmatic film that presents the tragedy primarily as a school lesson for today’s children. It is a long flashback in which a French grandmother talks to her grandson about tolerance, and is aimed primarily at the young adult audience as its source material, a graphic novel by RJ Palacio.

Directed by Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland”), the film is also a sequel of sorts – perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a “universe expansion” – to 2017’s “Wonder,” Stephan Chbosky’s film adaptation of a Palacio novel about a Smart, a kind-hearted, wise boy named August “Auggie” Pullman, who was born with a facial deformity, mandibulofacial dysostosis, and struggled to be accepted by his classmates. “White Bird” stands on its own as a film, but it has a connection to “Wonder”: the subject of the lesson is Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar, the only recurring cast member from the earlier film), one of the boys who used to bully and apologize to Auggie finally contacted him, but only after he had been expelled.

“White Bird” begins with Julian getting a belated taste of his own medicine at an elite Manhattan prep school, thanks to a bully who tells him in the cafeteria that he’s sitting at the “loser’s table.” He feels preemptively excluded and is obsessed with “fitting in” and being “normal,” which he defines as neither “mean nor nice.” His grandmother Sara (Helen Mirren), who is in New York for an exhibition of her art, tells him the story that takes up most of the rest of the film’s running time, about an incident in 1942 that took place in an outside Alsatian region The official borders occurred in the zone of Nazi occupation in France, but close enough to sense the creeping infiltration. The main character is fifteen-year-old Sara (Ariella Glaser), a Jewish girl whose mother and father (Olivia Ross and Ishai Golan) deny that they can escape persecution when the Nazi presence escalates, which of course it does.

The film very quickly turns into a modified version of The Diary of Anne Frank, in which Sara is hidden in a barn by the family of a classmate named Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt). Julien wears a brace because of polio and is mocked by some classmates who have nicknamed him “The Crab” because of his sideways walk. Time passes and feelings between the two grow. Protected and cared for by Julien’s parents (Gillian Anderson and Jo-Stone Fewings), Sara almost feels like she has a new family, or at least a very good, if likely, temporary replacement. The framing device guarantees that things will get much worse, and that is what happens.

Photographed by Matthias Koenigswieser in a wide “epic” format, “White Bird” has the rock-solid, good-looking but anonymous, workmanlike look that Academy voters seem to love in period dramas. The shots of houses, streets, landscapes and constellations of people do the work that the story demands of them, but rarely if ever convey any idea apart from their plot function. The film is also a little too blatantly production-tuned to be taken seriously as a gritty, realistic, true-to-life story (the sets all look like they were painted the night before cameras rolled). and most of the clothes look brand new; doesn’t anyone in this town have dirt on their knees or a sweater hanging on a nail?). All in all, it is too clear and neat in both the visual and narrative sense of these words to move and shock a viewer over, say, 14 years old who has seen a movie or read another book about the Holocaust for adults, or even learn a little about this dark time in European history in the classroom.

And frankly, there’s something tricky about the way the film reduces a largely nightmarish story about the immediate impact of a genocidal regime on the lives of a handful of people to a teenage romance with a bumper sticker message: As Grandmother Sara puts it: “You forget many things in life, but you never forget kindness.” In the end, there is a secondary message: kindness makes you more attractive and increases the likelihood of getting a date. There are many real-world counterexamples to this claim, but this is not the place to delve into them.