Friday, November 7, 2008

Movie review and director/author interviews: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

By John P. Meyer

Director Mark Herman's Holocaust-themed The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a thoughtful, adeptly-rendered screen translation of a John Boyne story that started out as a children's book. As you'll discover in the appended interview (with author Boyne and director Herman), the book was eventually re-imagined as a novel for adults - through the replacement of one cover design for another.

Springtime for Hitler and Berlin - briefly

We first meet young Bruno (played with transparent naivete by Asa Butterfield) as he's sporting about with his friends in the streets of a "Springtime for Hitler" Berlin. The boys swoop up one avenue and down another with their arms outspread, mimicking fighter planes. All appears normal until they reach a cul-de-sac where something odd seems to be going on.

Trucks are lined up before an apartment block, and people are being herded into them - some with suitcases and other belongings, and everyone looking quite put out and inconvenienced by this unanticipated forced field trip.

Bruno is momentarily puzzled, though his interest soon wanes and he swoops off to his own nearby house, where his parents (David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga - identified only as "Father" and "Mother") are discussing a momentous family event: they'll be moving away to the countryside so Father can take on a new assignment.

While Bruno assumes his Dad is a regular soldier - he does, after all, dress in the uniform of an officer in the SS - the man's function is more administrative than battlefield-oriented. And I think you can begin to see where this story is leading...

Gretel: poster child

Along with his parents and older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie, a literal poster child for Nazi Youth), Bruno takes up residence in a rambling estate in the apparent middle of nowhere - though from his upstairs bedroom window Bruno glimpses, through the woods, what appears to him to be some kind of a farm.

What he sees, of course, is eventually identified as a concentration camp, and though it's never identified by name in the film (or the book) as Auschwitz, writer Boyne confirms that this was the generic model for the place.

Thus begins a period in the lives of Bruno and his family in which denial - both conscious and unconscious - becomes the rule of the day. Through the gradual dawning of truth as experienced by Mother (Ms. Farmiga, eloquent in both outrage and despair), we the audience can in some way relate to the soul-numbing horror which those of conscience must have experienced as the nightmare of Hitler's Final Solution became a reality.

Lt. Kotler: menacing, vulnerable

Binding the story together is the central narrative of Bruno and his surreptitious (and strictly forbidden) exploration beyond the boundaries of the estate. In a search for new friends - having lost all his Berlin playmates due to the move - he eventually finds himself on the edge of the peculiar fenced-off farm, where he meets a strange, sad boy of his own age named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon).

Shmuel has a number stitched onto his faded jumpsuit, leading Bruno to inquire what sort of game might be involved. No game, says Shmuel, explaining that soldiers took away his clothes (and those of his father) and brought them to this place, where they work all day on construction projects. Bruno assures Shmuel that HIS father is not the kind of soldier who takes away people's clothes. (Sigh.)

Bruno, looking not unlike a youthful Führer. Oh, the irony.

The systematic cruelty instituted by the Nazi regime is reflected in the household staff's treatment of a camp-resident servant named Pavel (played with hangdog dignity by David Hayman). Pavel was a doctor before the Hitlerites accorded him animal status, as he proves one day when Bruno falls from a swing in the back yard: Pavel patches him up and is touched by the young boy's innocence in the face of blatant de-humanizing insanity. It's a touching connection, doomed from the start.

When Mother finds out what is really going on over at the camp (thanks to the loose lips of Lt. Kotler, played with just the correct level of sneer by Rupert Friend), she tells Father that she'll be leaving, and taking the children with her. Only, Bruno is suddenly nowhere to be found...

One is left at the end of the film examining one's own emotions at the tragic turn of events - and perhaps marveling that we can feel such sympathy for a particular victim, when the stories of millions of others remain beyond the scope of the narrative.

Then we recall that tragedies only strike a chord when they are told about individuals rather than generalized groups; and we come to a greater appreciation of the very real hazards inherent in dehumanizing.

Interview with Mark Herman and John Boyne - part 1

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Interview with Mark Herman and John Boyne - part 2

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• Movie review: The Unborn (Jan. 9, 2009)
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• Arts > Movies / Film > Independent Films