Out of the mouths of babes...

Rating: 10/10 (23 November 2008)

The numerous negative comments on the cast's "British accents" leave me disappointed in my fellow Americans who are still in denial that the world no longer revolves around them (if it ever did).
A country a few thousand miles east, across the Atlantic ocean, happens to have made this film (notice "BBC" in the credits?) and they did not set out to speak in a "British accent." They talk in the film the way people talk in that country. And why not? What were the alternatives? Should they adopt an American accent just to please us, leaving their own countrymen to wonder, with a sense of the surreal, just what (beyond the infamous gulags that our society seemingly needs to maintain order) America has to do with the story? Should they contrive German accents? What would be authentic about that? Germans don't normally speak English in a German accent; they speak German. So maybe everyone in the movie should have used German and given the audience subtitles to read? One can imagine how happy that would have made these critics.
No possible "accent" could be transparent for all Anglophones, but how the cast spoke was at least natural to themselves and to their primary audience. Why they were right to do so goes much deeper than convenience. Asked how he would portray the Nazis in his film Der Unhold (The Ogre), Volker Schlondorff replied, "as the most exciting people in the world, of course." Hence he showed them not as strange or alien in any way, but in living color. That Abel, his childlike hero, would be immediately converted to their cause was almost inevitable. How slowly did disillusionment ensue with innocence lost and uncomfortable facts accumulating.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas calls for a similar approach to the allures of Nazi images, ideologies, and institutions, because (among other similarities) they share a theme: a naïf's loss of innocence amidst unpleasant truths gradually emerging. The question is not so much "how did this happen to the Germans?" but more universal: "how might it happen to us?" As the historian John Lukacs wrote, understanding history requires self-understanding.
To be sure, Bruno, more than Abel, had early reasons for ambivalence. He never wanted to leave his home and friends in Berlin. He noticed that his grandma didn't approve of these new developments, either. The new house in the country didn't appeal to him, nor did his confinement to the walled front yard. The regimen of his tutor predisposed him to resist the propaganda he was fed. Mark Herman has apparently read his Dickens, whose _Hard Times_ had the poor Gradgrind children subjected to precisely the same grim pedagogical philosophy: out with fantasies and adventures, in with facts and almanacs. Our little explorer felt imprisoned mentally as well as physically. Is it any wonder that he could just as easily greet the camp's barbed-wire fence as another restraint upon himself, rather than upon anyone he saw on the other side?
Set against all this privation was a child's natural trust in his parents, that what they were doing was right or at least necessary. We see that this trust was not always absolute and was sustained in part by lies. Bruno seemed surprised when Schmuel said that he never doubted that his own father was a good man.
Most of the critics and commentators I have read tend to treat Bruno as an ignorant, confused little boy. This may be true at first, but let's not overlook the developments that show him becoming a resolute and courageous hero. I'm sure that when you see this film, you will not miss a brief moment at a dramatic halfway point in the story, which is almost as shattering as the much adumbrated ending. Among the evidence for the pivotal significance of this scene is when, after having sulked for weeks over living in this house, he amazes his family by voting to stay rather than leave. Does any earthly rationale explain this change of heart? The only rationale is heavenly: he is intent upon staying for Shmuel's sake.
However coincidental, it is extraordinarily apt to have seen this film on the Feast of Christ the King, in whose Holy Gospel Jesus discloses the contents of our final exam. It is about feeding the hungry and visiting prisoners. Oh, and clothing the naked (which raises again the question of who the prisoners are in this tale). It's as simple as that, huh. Even a child can do it. Yet how seldom most of us bother, even though it would be easier for us than it was for Bruno.