Considering the subject, why wasn't I moved or even shocked?

Rating: 6/10 (6 November 2008)

As a film about childhood, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" seems to me neither patronizing nor condescending and is equipped with an intelligence rare in films of its kind. Its target audience appears to be children of a certain age, (the age of its protagonists, perhaps, or a few years older?), though, God knows, in this age of dumbing everything down, where so-called 'grown-ups' are presumed to have the mental age of eight year olds, did the makers of this film really think it would play to that target audience? So should we be grateful that Mark Herman has made a film that doesn't insult us or at least treats an 'adult' subject in a user-friendly manner that will also appeal, though appeal hardly seems to be the right word, to children? Up to a point, yes. There are good things in this film, things that raise it above much of the run-of-the-mill fare that fills our multiplexes today. But this is also a film about the Holocaust; indeed, it is the Holocaust, rather than childhood, which dominates and in this respect I found the film, finally, both trivial and banal, or rather I found the ending trivial and banal since it reduces the horrors and evils of Nazism to a melodramatic cliché.
For a good deal of the film I was persuaded by Herman's view, (though really it is the view of John Boyne who wrote the book on which the film is based), of this period in history, which we know to have been an abomination. It's a simplistic view which is as it should be, since everything that happens is seen through the eyes of Bruno, the impressionable and likable eight year old son of a concentration camp commandant. (That is the first of the film's virtues; it lets us see that the evils that men do does not necessarily transfer to their children or even their wives or mothers).
Bruno has the naivety of true innocence and his very slow grasp of reality is disturbing. (You hope that some semblance of the horrors that are all around him rub off on him if only to harden him enough to save him). But this is a child's view of the world and the view of a child from a much earlier, much more innocent time. Yet the four years that separate Bruno from his older sister are telling. She is twelve but with all the precociousness and budding sexuality of a young woman anxious to please. She is easily lead and you fear for her.
The film is also good at the even-handed way it tells us that not all Germans were tainted by Nazism. Despite being married to the commandant of a concentration camp, Bruno's mother seems blissfully unaware of what is actually going on. Not only is she kept in the dark as to the exterminations in the gas chambers but she also seems unaware as to the whole programme which the Nazis developed for the extermination of the entire Jewish race, (to her, they are just prisoners). The realization, when it comes, disgusts her but she, like so many others, is powerless to do anything about it. (Dissention can lead to incarceration or even death). Even the young lieutenant is victimized for his father's failure to support the Party.
Where the film fails is in establishing any kind of convincing relationship between Bruno and Shmuel, the little Jewish boy he befriends behind the wire, which would make the ending devastating or even poignant rather than simply contrived. Shmuel is the boy in the stripped in the pajamas but he fades into the background and, despite being well played by Jack Scanlon, his character is never convincing. Still, I might have forgiven Herman this, (or Boyne, assuming Herman sticks to the novel's plot - I haven't read it), if he had not felt the need to go down the obvious, predictable route. I could see the ending coming a mile off, (or at least from the film's mid-point). What I couldn't see coming was the cack-handed way Herman handles it, depleting much of the good work he had done earlier.
Always a good director of actors, ("Brassed Off", "Little Voice"), Herman again draws fine performances from his cast. Asa Butterfield is excellent as Bruno, capturing both the boy's fragility and wide-eyed wonder. As Shmuel, Jack Scanlon is fine but it's an under-developed part, which is something of a pity. Vera Farmiga also manages to make credible the frankly incredible role of the incredulous wife and mother, although again I wish the part itself was not so formulaic, and there are nice cameos from Jim Norton and Sheila Hancock.
Other criticisms levied at the film from other sources are that it 'Disneyfies' the Holocaust and also that it looks like 'a BBC film'. I can't subscribe to the first. There is a much harder edge to it than Disney would ever have given it and while it may feel very much like a BBC production this, in itself, is no bad thing. No, the main fault with Herman's movie is that it is bland for too much of the time and hysterical just when it needs to be focused.