Reviewed by Stuart O'Connor
Stars Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis,
Vera Farmiga, Amber Beattie, Rupert Friend,
David Hayman, Cara Horgan, Sheila Hancock
Written by Mark Herman, based on the novel by John Boyne
Certification UK 12A | US PG-13
Runtime 94 minutes
Directed by Mark Herman
Some people are calling this film "the Disneyfication of the Holocaust". It isn't. It's been called revisionist. It isn't. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is, at its simplest, a story of boyhood friendship. It's also one of the most powerful and moving British films of the past few years.
Using an unlikely friendship between Bruno (Butterfield), the son of a Nazi death camp Kommandant, and Shmuel (Scanlon), a young Jewish prisoner in the camp, writer/director Herman gives us the Holocaust from a child's point of view. The story begins with 8-year-old Bruno and his family — Father (Thewlis), Mother (Farmiga) and sister Gretel (Beattie — leaving their comfortable Berlin home for a house in the countryside. From his bedroom window, Bruno sees in the ditance what he believes to be people working on a farm. Strangely, though, they all seem to be dressed in pyjamas. Bored and friendless (they're all still back in Berlin) Bruno disobeys his parents and venture off into the woods behind the house. Eventually he comes to a barbed wire fence, and sitting behind it is Shmuel, a boy his own age, wearing striped pyjamas.
The boys become friends, although they can't really interact in the normal way that boys do; they mainly sit and talk. Meanwhile, at home, sister Greta has been fully indoctrinated into the Nazi ways, while Mother has slowly realised just what is going on at the camp (the black smoke pouring from the chimneys is a bit of a giveaway). Eventually, Shmuel asks Bruno for help — his father has gone missing, and Shmuel wants Bruno to sneak into the camp and help him to look. So they hatch a plan — Shmuel will sneak some "pyjamas" out whith him the next day, while Bruno will dig under the wire.
It's hard to discuss The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas without revelaing the ending; let me just say that it's bleak, and anything but "Disney". The performances from the two boys, Butterfield and Scanlon, are surprisingly good, on par with those from the outstanding adult cast members — particularly Friend as a rather nasty Nazi. But this is a film that will really divide audiences and critics. Those who see it as "historical fact" will be disappointed, and possibly outraged. Those who see it as a sort of fairytale or allegory will probably come away with a sense of what Herman and his team were trying to get across. As an introduction for younger generations to the Holocaust, it's a good place to start. We adults bring our historical knowledge with us, but kids will come to it as naive and innocent as the character of Bruno is. He watches events unfold around him without really knowing what's going on. He doesn't know why, stuck out in the country and friendless, he's not allowed to play with the children on the farm. His father and the other soldiers constantly tell him how evil Jews are, but Bruno doesn't understand why. He's almost totally oblivious to the horrors going on around him, which makes this film so much more heartbreaking. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is an audacious, moving and very important film.