The Holocaust Filtered Through a Net of Innocence

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2009)

When a calamity as unconscionable and hideous as the Holocaust is scrutinized through the artless and unworldly eyes of a kid who has yet to celebrate the first decade of his life, it feels all the more harrowing and traumatic than ever since it is filtered and refined through a net of puerile innocence and unsophistication. Concepts like war and its immediate aftermath are just too much for the child's ignorantly blissful heart to deal with. So the question is: Is the holocaust a kid's stuff? The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a shot at it.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a movie looking at the Holocaust through the eyes of an eight year old boy (Asa Butterfield) who, after his high-ranking Nazi officer father's promotion, has to bid farewell to his friends in Berlin just to find himself desolate in the countryside with his family consisting of his father (David Thewlis), mother (Vera Farmiga) and twelve year old sister (Amber Beattie). In his sheer desperation, Bruno sets off exploring his whereabouts through a window to spot a concentration camp which, in his naivetÃ©, he takes for a farm chock-a-block with farmers in striped pajamas. With his insatiable curiosity getting the better of him, he skulks there to encounter a hollow-eyed Jewish boy of his age called Schmuel (Jack Scanlon) whom he befriends. This friendship goes on and on, with Bruno sneaking some food to the starvation-stricken and aggrieved Schmel, leading up to the movie's inevitable ending which I do not wish to disclose.
In the mean time, the quotidian life has an uncanny course of its own. The father, overly committed to his career as the commander of the camp, hires a tutor (Jim Norton) so that his children do not lag behind in schooling. Despite the tutor's success in brainwashing the girl into a racist monster, his attempts in stuffing the boy's Laodicean worldview with tidbits of chauvinistic mumbo jumbo bites the dust. The loving and seemingly submissive and clueless mother hits the roof over her serendipitous revelation that she has been frozen out of her husband's vile transgressions in incinerating Jews in crematoria. Also, the commander's assistant's getting dressed down (Rupert Friend) for his dereliction in reporting on his father's relocation to Switzerland at the time of war and venting his anger on the doctor-turned-potato peeler inmate, Pavol convincingly played by David Hayman, are of noteworthy scenes.
The director Mark Herman does not helm his movie on a taut and rock-sold premise. The script, based on a novel with the same name by John Boyle, is sprayed with some authorial contrivances just to push the plot a head and getting to the desired preordained ending at the expense of plausibility. That security is not high enough in the camp so Bruno visits it at his convenience and that Germans speak posh British accent raise some serious questions. All those shortcomings aside, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is rewarding in its emotional payoff and in the tiptoe performances of its cast, especially that of Vera Farmiga. The ending is so devastating that I had to comfort my wife. All in all, the Holocaust is not a kid's stuff but kids like Bruno and Schmuel makes it deserving of reconsidering our attitudes.