Could have been a good.movie

Rating: 5/10 (22 March 2016)

(Spoilers) I liked the first third of this movie that focused on the family life of a high-ranking Nazi official living in Berlin in the 1940s. Initially the action is seen through the eyes of Bruno, the eight year old boy in the family. The father has just been promoted to commandant of a death camp and the family is to move there. We follow Bruno's experience in moving from a comfortable life in a big house in Berlin to a walled house in the country where Nazi officials frequently meet. The new house is presented to Bruno as a farm house, the house being far enough from the concentration camp that the camp can be seen only from Bruno's room on the second floor. Being an adventuresome sort Bruno finally makes his way to the camp and, across the electrified barbed wire fence, befriends Shmuel, a boy his age in the camp.
The movie goes seriously wrong from the point of the meeting of the boys. The guards at the camp would have been on this Bruno/Shmuel relationship in about one minute and that would have been the end of that. Given that the essential premise is pure artifice, all that follows is the result of a false premise. There are too many wrongheaded events to list and I will give only a couple. The fact that touching the fence would result in serious injury, and likely death, was never addressed directly. In their exchanges across the fence both boys did not seem to regard the fence with proper respect. Even at the age of eight Bruno seemed to be a little dense--did he really not sense the evil that was going on behind the fence? Kids usually pick up on those kind of vibes pretty quickly. Improbably Shmuel shows up at Bruno's home to clean the glassware because he has small hands. Really? Later we see the housekeeper doing this job.
The one plot hole that really got me was the digging of the hole under the fence. First of all that could never have happened--do you think the camp guards would not notice that this was going on. It would take a lot of time for an eight year old boy to dig a substantial hole using a flat spade that was not even designed for digging. As presented this was a quick and tidy job. And how was the hole on the opposite side of the fence completed from Bruno's side? Whoever wrote this scene had never dug a hole in the ground.
After the setup and before the boys meet, the movie could have gone in a lot of interesting directions. It could have concentrated on Bruno's continuing to discover the truth and his gradual recognition of the evil that was being perpetuated. Or it could have pursued the conflict between the truth and Bruno's indoctrination by Nazi propaganda. An investigation of how the family was going to react over time would have been interesting. The mother was already moving away from the Nazi party line--how was that going to be resolved? The family dynamics over time would have been very interesting to follow without the intrusion of the unbelievable relationship between the two boys.
I was encouraged to identify with Bruno by getting to know him and his background well. The effect of not having gotten to know Shmuel or any of the other prisoners hardly at all created an imbalance in the impact of the final tragedy when in fact the enormity of Shmuel's tragic life should have played a more central role. Some flashbacks of Shmuel's life would have helped to more fully identify with him.
I found the acting to be uniformly good, particularly the young actors. Resting the movie on Asa Butterflied as Bruno was a risk, but he rose to the occasion. It is frustrating that such a good cast was stuck with such a dog of a screenplay.
The original score by James Horner is pleasant enough but it often seemed at odds with the developing tragedy.
If you want to see a movie about the impact of war on innocent children, watch "Ivan's Childhood." It establishes a totally different mood taking place in the Soviet Union during WWII, concentrating on twelve year old Ivan.