Emotionally draining, if at times overly simplistic

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2008)

A classic "through the eyes of childhood" story about the Holocaust. Asa Butterfield plays Bruno, a German 8 year-old whose father (David Thewlis) is the officer in charge of a concentration camp. Bruno has no clue what goes on at the camp, which he initially thinks is a farm where the weird farmers wear pajamas all the time. He sneaks up to the fence outside of the camp and meets a Jewish boy, whom he befriends. Slowly, he comes to realize that something awful is happening, and that his father is partly responsible for it. It's a great concept. It's not a great movie. I'm unsure if the fault lies with the original novel or the screenplay (by director Herman, best known for a couple of '90s indies, Little Voice and Brassed Off), but the story eschews interesting moral philosophy in favor of a more base emotionality. This is especially true in the ridiculously forced climactic sequence, with its swelling music and completely illogical cross-cutting. There's an earlier sequence in which Bruno informs on the Jewish boy in order to get out of some trouble. This should have formed the climax, similar to Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants. It's impossible to deny that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is powerful, but it should have been better.