The Holocaust Presented as a Grim Children's Fable

Rating: 8/10 (14 November 2008)

It's official. The award now goes to the British for making the most depressing film I have ever seen. For the first time in my movie-going life I witnessed an audience member's physical reaction to a film when a father was observed outside the screening room for "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" collapsed against the wall with his child emotionally distraught and crying in his lap. With the rest of the audience, including myself, stunned into silence after the film and exiting the theater a communal internalized wreck, I don't know if I was more devastated by what I had witnessed on screen or by that poor little child out in the hallway whose father for some reason thought this film would provide a history lesson his child could stomach at such a young age. As the film proves, the innocent are not cut out for war.
That being said, I would recommend "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" to anyone emotionally prepared to sit through it. The film's climax will hit you like a sucker punch to the gutbut there is a lesson to be learned for those in the right frame of mind and mature enough to handle it. In adapting John Boyne's novel, director Mark Herman envisions the Holocaust as a grim child's fable, and in doing so, presents the historical events from a daringly simple new angle. Yes, "Life is Beautiful" attempted something similar not so long ago, but that film was told from the point of view of a child-like man trying to shield his son from horrors and had abrupt tonal shifts that sank its dramatic impact. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas", however, keeps a powerfully consistent tone, and until the harrowing final act, is entirely told from the point-of-view of the young son of a German commandant assigned to run a concentration camp.
Herman directs the film fairly well, utilizing visual motifs and not so subtle foreshadowing (that left me with a sinking feeling in my gut as the film progressed), and he is aided greatly by the wonderful cinematography by Benoit Delhomme. The script, though contrived in parts, is tight and moves at a brisk pace, and the normally sappy composer James Horner shows great restraint with his score that is both haunting and reverent to the events that unfold. The mostly British cast is stunning. As little Bruno, Asa Butterfield successfully permits us to relate to the child's naïve innocence without ever allowing the character to become cloying or blissfully ignorant. David Thewlis commands attention as his tortured and misguided father, and Vera Farmiga is dynamite as his distressed mother. She gives a powerhouse performance and proves yet again to be a gripping chameleon of an actress nearing the level of a Cate Blanchett.
With its slim run-time, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" seems a sound choice for a future generation of teachers to show their high school students in lieu of an epic like "Schindler's List". It also makes a good visual companion piece to Eli Wiesel's literary "Night" as it shows a fictionalized flip-side to the same tragedy. As the real survivor accounts sadly fade with the passing of time, the horrors of the Holocaust will remain firmly in place in the world's historical fiction for centuries to come long after the last person who actually witnessed it has died. These stories will forever be screaming at us, and we would be wise to listen. Fault the film if you wish, but in its bold child-like simplicity it shows the insidious evil of the Nazis as two-fold. Yes, they slaughtered six-million innocent Jews, but it was an act of murder-suicide as in doing so they also sentenced themselves to death.