MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas Rated PG-13

Directed by Mark Herman.Starring Asa Butterfield, David Thewlis

Photo © Miramax Films
Movie Review by Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

How do you try to explain the Holocaust?  Nazi Germany’s ambitious plan to gather and exterminate millions of Jews was an organized and ruthless system of ethnic cleansing that continues to horrify and startle us today.  As terrible as the death camps were, it is a story that must be told so that it never happens again. 

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is based on a popular 2006 novel for older youth by John Boyne.  The book was titled “a fable” and deliberately looked at the Holocaust through the eyes of 8-year-old Bruno (Butterfield), the innocent child of an SS official (Thewlis) who moves his family from a lavish home in Berlin to a place in the country closer to work. 

There are walls and fences to keep Bruno from getting too close to “the farm” in the distance, with its factory and billowing smokestacks.  In the book, the boy makes up words for what he hears the grownups talking about.  His father takes orders from “The Fury” (Führer) and they move to “Out-With” (Auschwitz).  Eventually Bruno is able to make it to the barbed wire fence surrounding the farm where he begins a friendship with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy in striped pajamas who is equally unaware of the tragic possibilities lying in store for him. 

What works as a meditation in printed form, alas, doesn’t make it on the big screen.  There is just too much history getting in the way of this premise. Bruno and his sister would have certainly been in the Hitler Youth movement by this time and deliberately kept away from the prison camps. I was also surprised to find myself laughing at a rock star poster of Hitler that Bruno’s sister puts up in her bedroom, as her romantic attraction to a young Nazi officer plays for her affections. 

I know that this film has its defenders.  If The Boy in the Striped Pajamas helps to continue the conversation about the Holocaust, so much the better.  My personal choices for high school students (the intended audience for the book) would still be “The Diary of Anne Frank” (in the original as well as several good dramatic adaptations), the memoir“Night” by Elie Wiesel, and the fantasy “The Devil’s Arithmetic” by Jane Yolen (which was made into a stunning cable TV film, available on DVD). 

Pitchfork Rating: Two halos  (A respectful adaptation of a young adult novel about genocide that falls a bit short of commanding your attention.)
Five pitchforks (Hitler’s evil is the epitome of sin; this film is best viewed as a supplement to prior knowledge of the Holocaust and would be a shocking introduction to younger – innocent -- children.)

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