Review: The Boy In the Striped Pajamas (2009)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                  THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: With more the feel of a fable than of a
     genuine piece of history, this film tells the
     story of Bruno, the loving son of a father who was
     running an extermination camp for the Nazis.  With
     a child's innocence he does not understand what the
     camp is and, he makes friends with an interned boy.
     If the film is a fable, it is a powerful one.  Mark
     Herman directs from his own screenplay based on the
     novel by John Boyne.  Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or
     7/10

When the TV miniseries THE HOLOCAUST was made, Michael Moriarty was
playing a scene as a concentration camp commandant home for
Christmas.  He says that the scene made him just break down and
cry.  How can a father in that position look his family in the eye
and celebrate the holiday knowing he is a mass murderer?  It is
rare that a film looks at the effects of the Holocaust on the
perpetrators rather than the victims.  THE BOY IN THE STRIPED
PAJAMAS is a powerful look at the same sort of family.  Father
(played by the reliable David Thewlis) has just been promoted to
the responsibility of running a death camp.  He takes his family
 from Berlin to the unidentified village where the camp has been
located.  But though the two characters of Father and Mother (Vera
Farmiga) are well defined, the center of the film is eight-year-old
Bruno (a remarkable Asa Butterfield, actually eleven years old).
At first bored with his new home, he finds ways to sneak out the
back garden and go to the fence where he meets and makes friends
with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) who Bruno thinks has a fun life on what
he thinks is a farm were people wear pajamas all day.  Veteran
actor Richard Johnson plays Father's father and is probably the
source of Father's character flaws.

There are some problems with the narrative.  Bruno never realizes
what a death camp really is.  Of course, few of the audience
members are not far, far ahead of Bruno, though perhaps nobody who
did not go through the experience can really know.  But the film is
not about what is happening beyond the fence, but how Bruno's many
misimpressions are slowly corrected.  Even the suffering Shmuel
 from whom Bruno learns knows little more than Bruno does.  Also,
somewhat unrealistically, I think three people very close to Father
make very clear that they do not approve of Father's career in
spite of the prestige and success it brings him.  It is very
unlikely to have so many open dissenters in the same family as the
camp commander.  Multiple characters make quite a point in the film
how bad the chimney smoke from the camp smells.  But the production
of this smoke seems be a rare event, and that really does not make
sense.  Also why does Shmuel have so much time to sit by the fence?
Like LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, this film seems to soften the Holocaust in
order to tell a story that probably could not have happened in the
real world.

It has become a convention of the syntax of cinema to have an
accent substitute for speaking in a foreign language.  The obvious
choice would be to either have the actors speak German, or with a
German accent.  Instead an English accent was chosen, natural to
the English actors of the film.  The colors when Bruno first comes
to his new home are bright and vibrant.  As the film progresses
those bright colors seems to drain out of the film.  The colors
become much more muted.

James Horner, at one time disdained by film music aficionados,
gives the film a lovely melodic score with a little foreshadowing
and also a feeling of innocence at times.  Scores of this quality
have become infrequent.  Texture music scores with little or no
melody have become the rule.  It is nice to have melody back.

The film starts slowly and telling it tale very deliberately.  By
the end of the film it is moving at a breathless pace.  But the
film has a feel of insulating the viewer from the hard realities of
life in the camps.  We are told that Shmuel is hungry, but we see
nobody who looks like he has been missing meals.  The novel was
written for young adults and the film feels like it pulls its punches.
The final horrifying revelation is still a long way from the
painful realities of those days.  I rate THE BOY IN THE STRIPED
PAJAMAS a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0914798/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/boy_in_the_striped_pajamas/>

					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper