Disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (15 December 2008)

All right: the movie is a fable, not a realistic representation of real events. So I can forgive some of the many, many unrealistic events and situations in the story. Judging by other reviews here, the movie clearly works powerfully on many people. The young actor who plays the lead role does an excellent job.
Still, as I sat there watching the film, wanting to like it, I found that I could not suspend disbelief. The English accents probably played into this more than I wish, because I can never watch a movie like this without remembering my friend Martin who said years ago: "I'm always uncomfortable when the Germans in a WWII film speak better English than I do!" Couldn't they at least have tried German accents, if they felt they couldn't shoot the film in the German language?
But even past the accents, I just found so many parts of the story hard to swallow. Hard to believe the boy could take that many trips to the camp without his mother noticing he wasn't in the swing in the front yard. Hard to believe he could sit there at the fence for hours on end without being noticed. Hard to believe he could dig right under the fence on a moments notice. Hard to believe he just didn't chuck the shovel and climb THROUGH the fence, since this movie fence had the widest weave I've ever seen. And the list goes on and on.
And in the end, the story drops everything for the sake of a shocking ending that involves just as much coincidence as everything else. Even the build-up has the parents oddly prescient the some kind of serious danger is afoot...
It IS a great idea to look at the holocaust through the eyes of an (initially) uncomprehending German child. But in all the literature available, wasn't there a REAL story available? I can't help but think that a real story would have been even more powerful than this fable-made-concrete. Perhaps it worked better as a book. Too bad they didn't leave it alone.