Irish novelist John Boyne’s 2006’s work The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which has sold four million copies worldwide and topped the New York Times best seller list, was an historical mystery for children that served as an allegory for the loss of innocence and the power of friendship. Nine-year-old Bruno has to leave his carefree life in Berlin and travel with his family to Poland because his father has been transferred: you realise it is World War II, his father is an officer in the Nazi S.S. and the new assignment is commanding the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Wanting to explore – and unaware of the truth – Bruno ventures behind the family house and finds the mysterious 'Out-With", slowly making friends with Shmuel, a Jewish boy his own age who lives on the order side of the barbed wire. Some critics of the book objected to this foundation plot point, noting that children, like so many others sent to Auschwitz, were killed upon arrival because they could not contribute as workers. Given that Boyne was writing for a younger audience, with a clear cut moral purpose to his story, you can understand his decision. He needs Shmuel to subtly educate readers, not just Bruno.
The problem with the screen adaptation by English filmmaker Mark Herman, a director known until now for the scrappy British eccentrics of Brassed Off and Little Voice, is that it’s not a children’s film. Herman has made a film for adults who he wants to see anew through the innocent eyes of a child. He hopes audiences will be as open to the unfolding situation as the gawky, naïve Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is, but at the same time the daunting iconography of the Holocaust genre hangs over every scene: dread descends with the first shot of smoke wafting across the blue sky.
Because Bruno doesn’t fully comprehend what is happening, the movie can’t get at the questions that adults who do understand may well want answered, or at the very least asked. The family dynamic revolves around Bruno’s father, Ralf (David Thewlis), and his mother, Elsa (Vera Farmiga), but it’s overly simplistic. Elsa is upset with her husband because of their proximity to the camp, but it’s not clear if this is because she objects to the facility’s purpose or if she objects to Bruno having a chance to find out. Likewise there’s no sense of Bruno questioning his father’s motives, or having to make a paternal judgment.
Herman has gifted collaborators alongside him, including the great French cinematographer Benoit Delhomme (The Proposition) and composer James Horner (Titanic), whose evocative, baroque score is his best in too long. But in a way their artful contributions helps to cloud the storyline. It’s close to disingenuous to accept that audiences know the historical facts that Bruno doesn’t, but then deprive them of the inquiries they may well want to make. A few short, shocking scenes bridge the divide, but The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is the most deficient kind of screen tragedy: well-intentioned but ill-founded.
