Film Review: Just gloom in Holocaust film 'The Boy in the Striped Pajamas'

By John Beifuss

Thursday, November 20, 2008

"I hated that movie, but I loved it," the weeping woman behind me said after a preview screening of "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," a film that cynically might be described as the inspirational feel-bad Holocaust hit of the holiday season.

Nondocumentary Holocaust movies ("Life Is Beautiful" being one of the most celebrated and infamous) tend to divide audiences and critics -- and sometimes individuals, like the woman quoted above.

Some believe the films help viewers understand the need to work to ensure that "Never Again" is more than just a motto; others feel that all but the most skillful portrayals trivialize tragedy, reducing the past century's greatest horror to something safe and distant and -- on some level, at least -- "entertaining." But do we really want to restrict the freedom of storytellers by suggesting that any subject, no matter how sensitive, should be off limits to commercial filmmakers?

Based on a 2006 novel by John Boyne, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" concerns the friendship that develops -- across an electrified, barbed-wire fence -- between a lonely 8-year-old boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), and Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), also 8, a Jewish boy imprisoned in the concentration camp run by Bruno's SS commandant father (David Thewlis).

Bruno doesn't understand Shmuel's plight; he thinks the camp is a "farm" inhabited by "strange" people in "striped pajamas." In a German-centric twist on "Life Is Beautiful," in which a protective Jewish father convinces his young son that life in a concentration camp is just a game, Bruno's mother (Vera Farmiga) -- who becomes increasingly horrified by the lethal reality of her husband's job -- encourages her son's misinterpretation.

Impeccably produced, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" -- written and directed by Mark Herman ("Brassed Off," "Little Voice"), a master of the obvious -- does function at times as its own grotesque self-parody. ("What do you burn in the chimneys?" Bruno -- part Pollyanna, part Hitler Youth -- asks Shmuel.) The story is more symbolic than convincing; the inevitable ending is traumatizing. The fine acting helps. Perhaps the movie might be most profitably viewed as almost a genre film: A suspense thriller with a moral to its twist ending, like that old Nazi "Twilight Zone" episode, "Deaths-Head Revisited," but without the supernatural element.

"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is playing at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394