


The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas review

Paul Byrnes, reviewer
April 27, 2009

This adaptation may be too confronting for teens and too sentimental for adults.

Best intentions... Asa Butterfield and Vera Farmiga.

Best intentions... Asa Butterfield and Vera Farmiga.

Drama, Thriller/Suspense
Run Time
94 minutes
Yet to be classified
United Kingdom
Mark Herman

WE ARE approaching the time when there will be no one alive who survived the Nazi death camps. Who then will bear witness, when there are no longer any witnesses?

Nobel prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, who survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is said to believe that only those who were there can write about it. That would mean that Irish children's writer John Boyne should never have put pen to paper, because he was born in 1971. His book, upon which this film is based, has now sold 5million copies. For many young readers, it has been their first possibly their only experience of the Holocaust.

The book has been criticised for distorting the facts of the camps. Rabbi Benjamin Blech has written: "Note to the reader: There were no [nine]-year-old Jewish boys in Auschwitz the Nazis immediately gassed those not old enough to work." That's not strictly true either the Auschwitz website says there were more than 700 children in Auschwitz when the camps were liberated by the Red Army at the end of the war. There are famous photographs of those children.

The book, and now the film, offers us a terrifying fable, a moral lesson told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy but what distinguishes this from the classics in this field is that he's not a victim. Bruno's father is a high-ranking SS officer, who becomes the commandant at the camp he calls Out-With (in the book). The film never uses this corruption of Auschwitz, perhaps wisely. It's a little too coy and knowing. The film tries to avoid that pitfall but it doesn't always succeed.

Boyne wrote his story that way because he wanted the innocent eyes of an eight-year-old but I found the film's naivety a stretch. Too much naivety begins to look like a cousin of denial. The story depends on this little German boy not realising what is going on before his eyes; keeping up that pretext requires a whole truckload of story conditions that defy logic. And there is one golden rule if you are going to write a story set in a death camp: keep it real.

That's partly why I hated Life Is Beautiful and didn't much care for Schindler's List. Both films slipped into sentiment and/or hyperbole. Steven Spielberg let Ralph Fiennes become a devil; Roberto Benigni became an angel in a colossal act of hubris. Neither strategy admits the worst truth: these things were done by men, not devils.

Mark Herman's film understands that part very well. It's at its best in the way the adults are drawn, rather than the children. David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga, as Bruno's parents, give us a credible high-status Nazi couple - they love their two children, Bruno (Asa Butterfield) and Gretel (Amber Beattie), and they believe right is on their side. That makes them capable of justifying anything. It's really a film about them, in some ways; and at that level, it's powerful.

A lovely prelude establishes the gulf between childhood and the adult world as Bruno and his mates rush through the beautiful squares of Berlin, pretending to be fighter planes. He arrives home to find the servants rolling up rugs and preparing for a party. We see Jews being rounded up on another street but he lives in a world of privilege and fantasy. Father (Thewlis) gets a round of applause as he comes downstairs to the party, dressed like an SS prince. The arms all rise - Heil Hitler! His beaming father (Richard Johnson) congratulates him on his promotion; his mother (Sheila Hancock) is less kind. "You always adored dressing up," she says. "Does it still make you feel special?"

The promotion requires them to move to a new home in the country. From a window in his new bedroom, Bruno spies men and boys working on a farm through the trees. When he asks his mother why they all wear pyjamas, she forbids him to explore behind the house. Of course, he does so at the first chance, which is how he meets a boy his own age. Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) wears the striped pyjamas of the title; he is dirty and his head is shaved. They have to talk through an electrified wire fence, hidden from the guards by rubble (as if). Still, Bruno doesn't get that it's a prison camp. When Shmuel tells him he's a Jew, Bruno is silent, then fearful. He knows he's not supposed to talk to Jews, so he leaves.

There is another man in pyjamas at home. Pavel (David Hayman) limps around the kitchen, peeling potatoes and getting yelled at by a particularly brutal officer (Rupert Friend). Still Bruno doesn't get it but then neither does his mother. She knows the camp is full of Jews; she even complains about the burning smell. The young officer smirks when he says "they smell even worse when they are burning". Finally she understands.

Mark Herman made Brassed Off, Little Voice and Hope Springs, so this film is quite a departure. He approaches it carefully because it's basically aimed at young teenagers. We only see the camp from outside the wire for most of the film, just as Bruno does. We are left in no doubt about the brutality of what's going on there but it's almost entirely off-screen. Still, the film is terribly confronting.

Boyne's story is calculated to appeal to sub-teens, through the story of the friendship, but the film can't help but make the horror more literal. We see the smoke rising over the trees and eventually, much more. I don't know what age is too young to see this material but I do think the film is too sentimental to work for many adults. And yet, millions loved Life Is Beautiful, so what do I know? It's a serious film, just not a very credible one.
