Everyone should see this

Rating: Null/10 (15 March 2010)

I just watched this after seeing a trailer for it on another DVD and it's one of those films that I think will stick with me a while yet. The movie succeeds on every level. It's a parable based in the Holocaust, a fictional morality tale told against the backdrop of that great atrocity (and, though a fictional story, in most ways true to the reality of the time and place, including the oft-inaccurate diversity of German uniforms), but its also a story of the human condition, independent of setting, for both the better and the worse. Hope, friendship, unconditional love, family, exploration and curiosity about the world, deception, self-deception, lying, propaganda (the Big Lie), rampant nationalism, unquestioning obedience to authority and their policies, racism and other bigotry, unconditional hate: it's all here. The guts of the story could be set anywhere. Again, this is true on several levels, including that of a family eventually torn apart through deception and betrayal of trust, that of friendship between two people of very different backgrounds, as well as the cold hard reality of genocide (though rarely plotted quite as coldly, logically, cynically, and dispassionately as by the Nazi hierarchy) being a human tendency that is still very much with us.
Yeah, I didn't see the ending coming. I think it's perfect. Not what I wanted, of course, but that's what makes it so apt. I think the film may have been just as effective with any one of a number of outcomes, including that likely to be criticized as a 'Hollywood' ending but the piece as it exists is certainly a stark piece of testimony to the reality of the Final Solution and, ultimately, the broader and more all-encompassing sweep of human nature's dark side. The fact that it's a fictional story is basically irrelevant to these points.
As for the acting, set dressing, costuming, and cinematography; like the writing, it's all top-notch. In particular, the two boys at the center of the film are nothing less than supernatural in their portrayals, not only each possessing compelling command of facial and other gestures and unspoken language (and, yes, both have extremely expressive eyes) but each able to make the viewer totally forget that they're watching an actor at work on a set. That is not always easy for an adult to do, let alone a less experienced kid.
Pretty heart-wrenching stuff. I think it should be seen by everyone, not just to remind us of what happened to those deemed untouchable subhumans (Jewish and otherwise) by a bunch of power-mad authoritarians decades ago but to remind us of who we are: the good side of us and the other side, the side regarding which our kind are inevitably too often surprised by the ease with which it's possible to slide that way. The German people, 1933-1945, and even most of those in the Nazi machine, were not necessarily inherently evil people; likewise (as well depicted in Bruno Ganz' stunning portrayal in "Downfall") even Hitler himself was not a monster, he was just a man. Sociopaths aside, these people were not inhuman but all TOO human. The point here is that not only COULD this happen again but, in different ways and on different scales, it already HAS, just as it (close to home, think US Cavalry vs the locals here in the USA) had already happened time and time again in centuries past. Rwanda, Sudan, East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Bosnia, parts of Central and South America, the 'Democratic' Republic of Congo...the list of recent and ongoing centers of mass atrocity, not to mention the attitude of hate and xenophobia and lust for aggressive war and its spoils that is rampant in many countries (including my own), is depressingly fresh and vital.