The Boy in the Striped Pajamas plays out like the eerie shadow twin of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Both movies are set during the Second World War, with a young child moving from the big city to a house in the country, populated by emotionally distant, vaguely menacing adults. The lack of companionship felt by the main characters in both films makes those long summer days seem oppressive rather than exhilarating. In both movies, boredom is relieved, however, when their young heroes discover a secret passageway to an unfamiliar, frightening world.
The world that eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) stumbles across in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is no Narnia — his father (David Thewlis) is a rising star in the Nazi ranks, and the home where he’s taken his family is a short walk away from the concentration camp that he’s just been put in charge of. Bruno’s understanding of his father’s work is woefully ignorant. When he strikes up a conversation with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old Jew on the other side of the barbed wire fence, he actually envies the other boy’s life. “It’s not fair,” he says. “You get to spend all day playing with your friends over there, and I’m all alone.”
The slow, imperfect awakening of Bruno’s conscience takes up the bulk of the movie. While Bruno’s tutor does his best to indoctrinate him in Hitler’s philosophy, Bruno has a hard time reconciling his descriptions of the inferior, untrustworthy, rat-like Jews with his encounters with Shmuel, or with Pavel, the sad-eyed older camp inmate in the ill-fitting shoes who does odd jobs around the house.
Bruno isn’t the only one in the house who’s having a hard time sleeping at night. When his mother (Vera Farmiga) realizes that the “farm” she’s living next to isn’t a work camp but a death camp, she can’t get out of there fast enough. (Bruno’s 12-year-old sister, meanwhile, can’t get enough Nazi propaganda, and decorates her room with photos of German soldiers as if they were posters of the Jonas Brothers.)
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a British production, directed by Mark Herman, the man responsible for such jovial hits as Little Voice and Brassed Off!, and everyone in the film, Nazis and Jewish prisoners alike, speak in the same incongruously plummy accents. It is already a modest box office success there — surprisingly so for a film with such grim subject matter. Apparently, it’s been widely used as a teaching aid, a way to introduce young people to the concept of the Holocaust, and it could be an effective tool in that context — there is no onscreen violence, and the story is very skilfully constructed to show its innocent young protagonist gradually learning the true nature of the camp and his father’s connection to it. At the same time, the ending could easily traumatize a sensitive viewer.
About that ending — The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is about Bruno’s acquisition of knowledge, his path to a grown-up understanding of the world and his family. (In this respect, it’s the opposite of Holocaust kitsch like Life is Beautiful.) However, the film abandons this theme at the crucial moment. Instead, it opts for a melodramatic ending that moves away from Bruno at the moment he gains ultimate awareness of the camp’s horrors, and instead places its emphasis on the agony of two Nazi parents. It’s a gut-punch of a final scene, no doubt about it, but it’s also a damned strange place for a Holocaust movie to wind up.
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