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Review

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Director

Mark Herman

Year

2008

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Considering the story goes on mostly in Auschwitz, you can’t hope for a brighter side of the Holocaust than that seen from the point of view of a Nazi boy in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. He is, naturally enough, not the same as the boy in the title, that one being a prisoner in the camp where the Nazi boy’s father, who is the one worth being called that (and proud of it), is Kommandant. How to explain what’s going on to an eight-year-old? “You see… These people are not really people at all” is a worthy approach, but the kid, Bruno, convincingly played by Asa Butterfield, quite prefers to think these people are farmers in pyjamas (or pajamas, depending on which side of the world you’re on, but he’s in Germany, so).

One wonders how it all works. It’s actually very simple, I would volunteer: everything we are, the way we think, the perspective from which we see things and the manner in which we act is a construction of paradigms that come from childhood in many cases, and become so hard to break we just simply buy them as our own. The contrast between father and son here, for example, is remarkable. Herr Kommandant, played by David Thewlis, is not a bad man, or so thinks Bruno who refuses to see him as such and to an extent so do we, but hell, he hates Jews with all his might, he believes they deserve what they’re getting under his custody and he’s just not gonna stop believing that no matter what anyone says.

So what’s Bruno’s fate? Is he heroic enough to grow up differently? Certainly not. The example is perfectly illustrated through his sister, at first a child who plays with blonde dolls and later a perfect believer of the Nazi ideals who puts her dolls away and hangs propagandistic posters on her wall, dresses as a Nazi girl and falls in love with one so brutal that he can pound a Jew to death in their house with their father not doing a thing to stop him. It’s all perfectly systematic: the natural conflict arises that the father did nothing to save a human being from death; Bruno can’t get that; his sister, Gretel (Amber Beattie), now struggling to become a woman with her own opinion, simply decides it’s wiser to trust her dad’s judgment… though she doesn’t really get it either.

The mother, performed in scene-stealing fashion by Vera Farmiga, is also a wonderful character: she’s immersed in the ideals but suddenly starts to wonder what’s the logic behind it and can’t quite grasp it; I’m not sure how believable it is that this would happen to the mother of Bruno while he’s going through a similar phase, only in reverse (struggling to stay away from horror rather than running away from it), but that they’re mother and son, even though they never talk about these matters, is probably what makes it plausible.

The whole piece is rather neutral, as ought to be, because siding with a perspective would eliminate the poignancy of Bruno discovering the world in which he lives and the adults around interpreting it through their old paradigms. The whole thing is rather un-self-conscious, and I liked it. Even James Horner’s score, though moving, is rather restrained.

The story, scripted by director Herman from the novel by John Boyne, twists, and that’s lucky because we don’t care much for the chronicle of a yet unspoiled Nazi kid growing up to be unwillingly brutal, not to say that brutality doesn’t deserve a punishment but I’m a fervent believer that all sociopaths and psychopaths are sick, in many cases, beyond their control.

The twist comes as Bruno, who dreams of being an explorer, goes farther than allowed and suddenly finds himself in the camp limits where a metallic fence separates him from the horrors of Auschwitz and, more specifically, from a boy his age who’s wearing a pyjama all day long, the slothful brat. (Hold your horses! That’s how Bruno sees him.) As their friendship evolves, the movies comes to life, and the kid, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon, who in my opinion looked healthier than he acted), isn’t even much of a conversationalist, but he’s the most puzzling creature Bruno could have found, and one human being he prefers above all others. How their relationship evolves and what happens in the end is probably too much to be likely, but it’s something from a child’s tale that can’t be faulted except when seen through the morbid eye of an adult.

Bruno refuses to see reality. Somehow, the kid on the other side does too. Even though he knows and understands that being a Jew is the worst mistake anyone could make in the time and place where he lives, he’s proud enough to stick to his family and repudiate those who persecute them but simply can’t see why. It’s not for a kid to understand. The most valuable asset of this film, I think, is the understanding that reality is nothing but a series of interpretations and that it depends entirely on who’s telling the story. As told from the point of view of a boy who hasn’t really interpreted much yet, this is priceless.

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