Stark Tragedy.

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2010)

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the eight-year-old son of the commandant of a Nazi death camp. Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) is a prisoner of the same age. The two boys meet on opposite sides of the barbed wire fence that encloses the camp. Thus, the set up for endless banalities.
You have to be very careful in dealing with the genocidal program of the Nazis because the historical events are so moving that they are easily exploited and cheapened. And you have to be careful with children on screen. They're so often childish. They so often seem to be there in order to be abused or get sick and need a kidney transplant.
These are onerous problems, but this movie manages them fairly well until the very end.
We see a relatively normal German family through the eyes of Bruno. Dad (David Thewless) is a little distant, perhaps, by our standards, but Mom (Vera Farmiga) is in charge of the kids anyway. Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen, you know? Dad is mostly around to make major decisions regarding the household.
Their house is in the countryside, far from home, but near the prison camp. Alone and friendless, Bruno wanders through the woods until he meets and befriends Shmuel. He asks Shmuel the kinds of questions an inquisitive eight-year-old might ask. "Why are you wearing striped pajamas?" Bruno begins to question his father's probity too, which is always a bad idea, especially in a traditional German family, especially when Dad is an Obersturmbannfuhrer in the SS and is killing and cremating Jews, like little Shmuel, by the thousands.
It's well photographed and nicely acted. The lead performances are fine. David Thewless isn't presented as a bald, bespectacled monster. And Vera Farmiga, with her strangely askew features, does a nice turn as the mother who discovers, all at once, that people are being murdered next door.
Some of the moments are more expectable than others. When Shmuel is discovered in some mischief, he's hustled off by a stern SS officer for a talking to. The next time Bruno meets Shmuel at the fence, Shmuel's head is down -- and we know instantly at the shot that when he lifts his face it will be battered. That's pretty cheap.
In fact, except for the family dynamics and the colloquy between Bruno and Shmuel, the trajectory of the plot is fairly predictable, at least until the very end when it falls apart completely.
It's unbelievable that Bruno could get a gander at a propaganda film produced by his father, portraying the camp as a kind of Club Med resort with games and music -- and still believe it. He has, after all, been talking at length with an inmate. It's even less believable that Bruno and Shmuel would giggle with delight as Bruno transforms himself into an inmate and crawls under the fence only a few minutes before the two of them, along with a horde of others, are swept up for extermination.
We see Farmiga reduced to hysterical weeping and Thewless stone-faced and distraught, as if, "There, that will teach them a lesson about humanity." It would have been more realistic and ending, more demanding, and equally tragic, if Bruno had said good-bye to Shmuel for the last time and left with his mother and sister for the safety of Heidelberg. The existing ending is too easy. Moral lessons aren't forced on us with such easy drama in life. As it is, the fundamentally decent Farmiga has learned nothing, and the self-disciplined Thewless will never admit to the evil he does.