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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Confined Innocence

Movies aren’t really a profound medium, and they rarely can probe very far into the realm of ideas. But they are capable of creating an explicit sense of time and place, and a visceral involvement in audiences, through what Susan Sontag once called “sensual elaboration.”

The stunning, virtually unfathomable enormity of the Holocaust might seem beyond the means of filmmakers to convey. Isn’t cinema too explicit and immediate to deal with such incalculable depravity, after all?

Perhaps it has severely limited powers of explication, but there have actually been at least a few respectable film efforts to capture something of both the epic and personal nature of the terrible period when the Third Reich’s Final Solution was operating. Foremost among that small number is Steven Spielberg’s unexpectedly accomplished Schindler’s List.

Spielberg, at least, had a historical record to work from in his biopic, but in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Mark Herman has tried for something that’s probably harder in its own way to bring off: to portray moral insights in a story of childhood innocence confronted with the Holocaust’s singular and massive iniquity. (Although it can’t be regarded as quite so unparalleled after the Cambodian killing fields and the Rwandan Hutus’ mass savagery.)

Herman’s film gives us the Holocaust and Nazi barbarity as apprehended by an uncomprehending child. Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the eight-year-old son of a privileged Berlin family during the Second World War whose contented life is uprooted by his military officer father’s (David Thewlis) transfer to a remote rural area (the movie never specifies where). The boy, who once played with his mates in the streets and plazas of his urban neighborhood, finds himself and his activities mostly confined to a large house and walled gardens that are protected by soldiers. When he asks his mother (Vera Farmiga) about the “farm” he spies from a high bedroom window and the “farmers” who appear so strange in their pajama outfits, she’s evasive and worried in her response. Soon, the window is boarded up. But the adventurous, restless Bruno finds his way through the woods to the edge of that farm, where he discovers an electrified wire fence and behind it, Schmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy of the same age who has a number on his striped prison uniform. These two strike up an unlikely relationship and the pale, sad-eyed (and to Bruno, the exotically named) Jewish boy becomes the isolated German boy’s only friend, even if his visits are restricted to only one side of that fence. And for the bulk of what ensues, Bruno still doesn’t get it. To a great extent, he never really does. And this incomprehension is at the center of the film’s increasing failure of moral persuasion and verisimilitude.

Herman adopted his script from John Boyne’s recent novel of the same title, and this source may be at the heart of the failure. Reportedly, Herman compressed and reworked the novel and he has obviously striven to create a cinematic substitute for Boyne’s literary presentation of a child’s viewpoint. The basic material defeats his efforts. The dubious premise and the increasing reliance on bluntly incongruous plot devices lead up to a final melodramatic crescendo that seeks to convey a horrifically tragic dimension, but which feels heavily contrived.

The slight, 11-year-old Butterfield gives one of the best film performances by a youngster in years, but despite this, Bruno isn’t really much more plausible than the rest of Boy. Early on, we find him running through a Berlin streetscape (actually Budapest) past Jews being rounded up for transport to the same kind of grim fates over which his father is to preside as a camp commandant. Yet the boy remains unaccountably unaware of the horrible events that are shaping his family’s existence. Bruno is only eight but he’s not intellectually deficient. He’s capable of engaging in wordplay with the camp prisoner assigned to household chores around the home, but he doesn’t seem to grasp what this man is, or why, eventually, he is no longer there. The dynamics in this family seem off and arbitrary.

Herman’s film is clearly meant to engage with its historical subject through Bruno’s experiences but its discordant plot developments and its big, unwieldy climax suggest a crude naivete that’s as crippling as Bruno’s.


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