"Heil, Bruno!"

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2008)

Mom liked her daughter better when she played with dolls. After a few history lessons with the tutor, Gretel(Amber Beattie) banishes the dolls into a transmogrifying darkness, where her brother Bruno(Asa Butterfield) discovers the plastic bodies arranged like the recently dead in an open grave. Mom liked the dolls better than their replacement, an Adolph Hitler poster. The Nazis killed Gretel's childhood, then she vanquished her dolls and treated them like a rumor, hiding the evidence in the family basement. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is a reconstructed fable for holocaust deniers. With Bruno, the filmmaker supplies his protagonist with rhetorical dialogue, disguised as child-like innocence. When Bruno asks his sister, "What are your dolls doing in the basement?", on an extra-diegetic level, this question exists outside of the official text; the question posed by Bruno is how the filmmaker demonstrates that the boy is being employed as a repository for the unofficial narrative being read by an auxiliary audience. The dolls in the basement look unmistakably dead, like Jews; these dolls, these paralleling Jews, were once kept alive by Gretel, alive in the sense that their existence is a contingency based on a dictator's imagination. Greta has the power of "life" and "death" over the dolls. Her room is like a concentration camp: the basement, conversely, can be construed as a crematorium. When Bruno stumbles upon the "bodies", the double-edged side of his question stealthily acts as a chastisement towards his sister's carelessness, because this metaphorical signifier causes his naivety to look more like a disingenuous act. On a metafictional level, the jig is up, but Bruno sojourns on, this denial about the "farm", with disastrous results.
About her character Cindy Brady, "Brady Bunch" fans would sometimes approach the actress and ask, "Is Cindy retarded?" She played "the youngest one in curls" with a guilelessness that made her powers of cognition seem feeble. It's not hard to imagine Cindy asking the stepfather, "Why does the farmer wear pajamas?" if the Bradys were transplanted to Nazi Germany. Children want to believe their parents are good people; in Bruno's case, his mother(Vera Farmiga) is married to a commander for the Nazi army. The old man who lives in their villa, used to be a doctor; he fixes Bruno's leg after the boy falls off his tree swing. The disbelief Bruno projects upon learning about the Jew's past sounds unmistakably like harassment masquerading as naivety. It's practically a catch-22 when Bruno asks the servant about why he's peeling potatoes instead of practicing medicine.
Any holocaust denier comes to the table with facts of his own ideological think-tank's making. Their reconstructed reality is like an inside joke they enjoy replaying to the world at-large with a straight face. In Bruno's convoluted world, an electrified barbed wire fence helps keep the farm safe from animals, and is not the last defense against escape in a concentration camp. He meets a boy there. In the grand tradition of Nazi films, there is always one good German who befriends the Jews. Schmuel(Jack Scanlon) has a benefactor who will sit with him under the hot Bavarian sun. More than anything, the Jew expects food from his unexpectant benefactor. Schmuel is no exception; the boy in the striped pajamas is hungry, but Bruno doesn't fill the Oskar Schindler roll because he believes the boy is on holiday. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" surreptitiously allows the film's subtext rear its knowing head by making the transfer of food problematic. In short order: Bruno eats the boy's chocolate, feigns having anything to do with Schmue's half-eaten pastry when they're found out, and drops the boy's sandwich somewhere in the woods. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is at its most self-reflexive when Bruno churlishly giggles at the manner his "houseguest" attacks the pastry. He thinks Schmuel's hunger is a laughing matter. During Bruno's letting down of his guard, the film goes beyond fable, and reveals itself as farce of the pitchest black.
Hard-wired for pretending, Bruno races through the woods, late in the film, with a shovel raised up high; an echo of the war games he played with his Berlin friends when they were doing the blitzkreig. A person who lies compulsively, over a long period of time, may start to believe his own bull****, which the film shrewdly demonstrates, as Bruno inexplicably digs a trench under the fence to let himself in. His seeing is an act of unseeing- the malnourished people clad in pajamas, the horrid living conditions, the stench- his blind spot is either a sign of mental retardation, or a deep-rooted conviction that the Jews are non-people. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas", to its credit, supplies a climax with cross-purposes: it punishes the holocaust denier, in private, while a majority of the audience sees Bruno's gassing as punishment for the father. Bruno is punished for being in a propaganda film; not the propaganda film-within-the-film, but the film itself. In the opening minutes, the music that plays over the soundtrack compliments the crane shots of Nazi-era Berlin to give the impression of a benevolent Germany. And there is Bruno and his Anglo-Saxon cronies, playing their part in the war effort, running down the streets of a liquidated neighborhood with their arms extended in willful oblivion.