About the movie
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Rating: 
Cast:
David Heyman; Sheila Hancock; Vera Farmiga; Jim Norton; Amber Beattie; Cara Horgan; Rupert Friend; Asa Butterfield; David Thewlis; Richard Johnson
Directed by:
Mark Herman
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READER FEEDBACK
‘Striped Pajamas’ is hard to watch
The grim calculus of responsible Holocaust art hangs morbidly over "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas."
It's a movie made with the right ethical credentials, having assimilated the Primo Levy/Elie Weisel critiques about Holocaust narratives - if you're going to attempt them, you've got to honor the essence of the Holocaust, and the essence is murder.
So, "Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is morally defensible, but very hard to watch, since the important characters in this story (based on a highly regarded John Boyne novel) are children, often photographed with the smoke of the crematorium rising behind them.
The story centers on Bruno (Asa Butterfield), a nine-year-old German boy with a child's understanding of the death camp next to his new home in the country. The boy's father (David Thewlis), who is the Nazi commandant of the camp, has told Bruno it's a farm, and the boy accepts this, though he wonders why the workers wear strange uniforms.
"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" builds drama around what Bruno's family knows and what it is willing to admit, even to itself.
The commandant dismisses his job as duty, but his wife (Vera Farmiga) feels revulsion and complicity. Bruno's older sister succumbs to propaganda (as she's emotionally seduced by the jack-booted glamor of a young officer), but her grandmother disowns the family.
Most of the focus, though, is on little Bruno, who wanders to the edge of the compound and befriends, through the barbed wire, a little Jewish boy named Shmuel. The images are arresting - the innocence of boys at play wrapped in the monstrous reality of the adult world around them.
It's also an interesting narrative starting point, but one whose evolution I dreaded, given the movie's limited array of moral options. Even discounting that resistance, though, there was a clumsiness to the relationship that kept the young characters at arm's length.
It's one thing to read a book and imagine a friendship between Shmuel and Bruno, another to see it on film, where the physical world imposes itself - the barbed wire between the boys, for instance, is a real barrier to their rapport. And as the boys play checkers and other games for hours, days on end, you wonder where the guards are.
Well, they're front and center for the conclusion, which replaces the implied horror of Boyne's epilogue with lightning, thunder, tears and, yes, death. Nothing is left to the imagination.
Produced by David Heyman; written and directed by Mark Herman; music by James Horner; distributed by Miramax.
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