Haunting ironies of a child with a Nazi father

Rating: 9/10 (1 November 2008)

What if a boy whose father was a high ranking Nazi officer started looking in on a concentration camp, and befriended a Jewish prisoner his own age across the fence? That's the premise of this English film shot in Hungary based on a bestselling young-adult novel by Irish writer John Boyne.
The film shows events primarily from the point of view of the eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield). He and his mother and older sister are swept away by his ambitious Father (David Thewlis) from their posh Berlin mansion when he gets a promotion. A big farewell party evokes all the creepy grandeur of Nazi power. Not all Bruno's family love it. Just the way Father descends the stairs and slowly returns the Heil Hitler salute radiates squishy moral dishonesty and greed. Bruno leaves friends and school with the family to live in an austere Bauhaus fortress in view of a "farm." That's what Bruno thinks it is. The people on the farm are peculiar, though. They all wear pajamas.
Bruno's forbidden to go out back. But he's an explorer at heart, and he's also bored and lonely. Before long he's sitting on one side of the electrified fence and Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a sqinty boy with shaved head and pajamas, is sitting on the other.
This relationship--spurred by the innocence and tact of both boys--and the audience's awareness of what situation Shmuel is really in and what kind of place Bruno's father is really in charge of, create a powerful tension that is at the core of this heart-breaking tale. But it's what happens in and around the house that shapes our feelings. Bruno's teenage sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) listens to the tutor brought in to indoctrinate the two siblings with "history" (Nazi propaganda). She puts up posters and photos in the bedroom and becomes a more and more enthusiastic Nazi, while Bruno ignores it all--he prefers adventure books--and focuses more and more on his meetings with Shmuel, his single, forbidden and hard to reach and therefore very special friend, to whom he brings food, questions, and a checker board.
Bruno finds out a man named Pavel (David Hayman) working in the kitchen who bandages his cut leg used to be a doctor and thinks it an example of the oddity of adults that the man would give that up to peel potatoes.
Gretel flirts with Lieutenant Kotler (Rupert Friend), a blond Arayan type in lieutenant's uniform who works at the villa and joins the family at dinner. But Father's questioning reveals that the Lieutenant's own father fled to Switzerland because he didn't like the way things were going, and Kotler gets in trouble for not reporting his father for that. A remark the young lieutenant makes reveals to Mother (Vera Farmiga) what the foul-smelling smoke from the "farm" means, and she breaks down, and eventually demands that she and the children be sent back to Berlin. Lieutenant Kotler seems to overcompensate by being particularly brutal to Pavel, but he is sent to the front. Father's own mother showed her lack of sympathy for the Nazis at the going away party before the family moved. She refuses to come to visit. Bruno begins to question whether Father is a good man, as Shmuel says his is. He has tried to ignore the tutor's propaganda but he realizes that Pavel and Shmuel are Jews and that they're supposed to be enemies. At one point he betrays Shmuel, but he regrets it deeply and pays a great price to compensate. News that against his wishes Bruno's going to be taken away from his secret friend leads him to take more drastic action, leading to a shocking climax.
The film, immaculately shot and subtle in its unfolding, reminded me of 50's classics like Carol Reed's 'The Fallen Idol' and René Clément's 'Jeux interdits' ('Forbidden Games)', haunting depictions of a father figure whose perfection becomes suspect and the twisted secrets the horrors of wartime force upon the very young. The idea of children's concealments becoming far more serious than they admit also suggests Andrew Birkin's amazing film version of Ian McEwan's 'The Cement Garden.' Herman and his gifted cast and crew--the settings are rich and impressive--are treading on virtually sacred ground with hardly a misstep. In their essential roles Asa Butterfield is a subtle young actor and Jack Scanlon is touching and real as his counterpart across the Holocaust divide.
Beautifully done as it is, 'The Boy in the Striped Pajamas' risks at times seeming merely a conceit. In its rethinking of the War from a child of Nazis' privileged (because innocent) perspective it is somewhat contrived, as a young-adult book on such a special subject risks being. The finale, though harrowing, would seem far-fetched if it were not so sudden and overwhelming. This film hasn't the intensity and veracity of 'Fateless,' Lajos Koltai's Hungarian film based on Nobel winner Imre Kertész's autobiographical novel and screenplay about a teenager surviving concentration camp life. But on the other hand, this film, being all in English, strangely takes on an even more universal quality, and provides a unique experience full of dark ironies only the perky English voices and the generally comfy settings can evoke. For some of us the horror of the Holocaust seems exotic and remote. Wishful-thinking complicity in evil-doing is much closer to home.