Movie Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

A lot of adult reviewers are panning “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” as a maudlin retelling of an overfamiliar Holocaust story about concentration camps and “good” Germans who permitted them, perhaps in ignorance.

I think that's because they haven't taken into account the audience for whom this won't be old news: anyone who may be ignorant of history but mature enough to absorb these horrors, most probably high-schoolers. I think it will hit them like a hammer blow, and it won't seem maudlin at all.

The film comes from a novel by John Boyne that's popular with that age group. While it may seem tired to those who've heard this story, it can be a potent mind-opener to anyone who doesn't know about millions killed by the Nazis in eastern Europe.

Most of it is seen through the eyes of Bruno (Asa Butterfield), a 9-year-old whose seemingly pleasant father (David Thewlis) has an important job in the countryside – supervising farmers in a camp, as far as Bruno knows.

He's not just curious but extraordinarily naïve: He thinks the unhappy people on the “farm” are merely shy, that their prison suits are “striped pajamas” and that the little boy he meets there, an inmate named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), is having fun all day because he's out of school. Even the electrified fence doesn't make Bruno suspicious, and lonely Shmuel doesn't wise him up for fear of losing a friend in the outside world.

Bruno's mother (Vera Farmiga, who gives a deeply felt performance) tries to learn as little as she can about her husband's duties and wants to keep Bruno wholly unaware of them; like her mother-in-law, she doesn't believe some races or religions make people undesirable, and the sight of prisoners disturbs her. But her queasiness turns to a horror she can't stomach when she learns the smoke from nearby chimneys comes from incinerated human beings.

Even the most receptive audiences may be put off by the fact that everyone speaks with a British accent. (Humble Shmuel is, of course, a Cockney.) This tradition of Brits as Germans goes back half a century, but it's a thumb in the eye of verisimilitude.

The movie also relies on more than one unlikely situation – Bruno gets away from his parents' house rather too easily, although everyone's been told to keep him away from the nearby prison – and an ending that will seem like melodrama, because it relies on one whopping coincidence and a few small ones. But those problems won't concern anyone caught up, perhaps for the first time, in a story that has the potential to rend any hearts that remain open to it.