Misguided, boring and emotionally manipulative

Rating: 1/10 (10 March 2009)

I know people will get upset when I say this but this film bored the ever-living hell out of me. Personally I think that we need another three hour (actually it was 90 minutes but it felt like three hours) dull-fest about the holocaust like we need a hole in the head.
Don't get me wrong, I think that the holocaust was an atrocity of proportions so staggering that it is difficult to conceive. And that is partly the point. I cannot empathise with the people in the death camps, surely no one who wasn't there could. I understand on a purely intellectual level that the suffering was unimaginable - UNIMAGINABLE, as in not possible to imagine, at all, ever.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas follows Bruno, the young son of a senior Nazi, as his family moves to the country where his father put in charge of running what the boy initially thinks is a farm of some kind. Exploring, Bruno meets (through an electric fence) a Jewish boy of his own age and the two talk. Despite fine acting on the part of the two central child actors the film is meaningless and unrealistic. Sadly it follows the unerringly "safe" route of so many films of its type by showing us the horror with none of the insight. It has the usual cast of "goodies" who are unaware of, shocked by or victims of the holocaust and the "baddies" who are monstrous almost inhuman figures whose motivations remain unknown and unexplored. Even as he is being led to the denouement the protagonist remains wilfully ignorant of the nature of the camp that his father is running which is not only stupid but actually quite insulting.
The mistake that lies at the core of films like Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Schindler's List and twenty other films about the holocaust is that they concentrate on the suffering of the victims of the holocaust to the exclusion of all else. Implying that we can, in even the tiniest way, empathise with people who went through this experience diminishes the pain of those who did. They place us in the metal position of the victim, unable to affect the outcome of this terror while ignoring the far harder truth, that what we should be frightened of is not victimisation but becoming the victimisers. By showing us only the horror of the people in the camps films like this one run the risk of allowing us to forget the horror that we could be the ones running them.
The central message of the film appears to be that the holocaust was bad - really, really bad. Good God, it's sixty years afterwards, is there anyone out there who doesn't know that by now? Is there a man, woman or child on the planet who wouldn't recognise a picture of Aldof Hitler as The Most Evil Man Ever (TM) and be aware of his attempted murder of an entire race? I somewhat doubt it.
If you want to see a truly gut-wrenchingly terrifying film about the holocaust watch the little known HBO TV movie Conspiracy (2001) starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci. That film contains not a single gunshot or image of the holocaust and yet can, quite justifiably in my opinion, claim to be both the best WWII movie ever made and the most coldly horrifying examination of humanity's capacity for evil. Stacked against that, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is quasi-feel good holocaust tourism.