Adapted from John Boyne’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas opens with a quote that characterizes childhood as being a carefree period before “the dark hour of reason grows.”
While generally true, there’s not much of that apple-cheeked optimism
in this well-crafted World War II drama, told from a child’s-eye view.
The quote, rather, serves as counterpoint for a prism through which
prejudice, dehumanization and corrupted innocence are all assayed in
quasi-fabulistic fashion.
The film unfolds through the eyes of eight-year-old Bruno (Asa
Butterfield, above), son of Nazi commandant Ralf (David Thewlis) and
Elsa (Vera Farmiga), a stay-at-home mother who embraces willful
obliviousness with regards to her husband’s soldierly duties. Largely
shielded from the realities of war, and certainly his father’s
complicity in its grim prosecution, Bruno grumbles at having to move
away from his friends and out to the country, where his family settles
into a large house with a distant view of a commune-style barn where all the “farmers” wear strange pajamas.
With no children with which to play, Bruno befriends a kitchen worker
named Pavel (David Hayman), a pitiful, shuffling older man who in
another life was a doctor.
After a week of hanging around the
house, Bruno sneaks out through the back garden in search of adventure.
He finally stumbles across Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a mousy Jewish boy at
the nearby fence-ringed farm — which is of course plainly evident to
the audience a concentration camp under Ralf’s newly expanded oversight
— and a forbidden friendship develops between the pair. A visiting
tutor hired by his father lectures him that all Jews are evil, and his
older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) eagerly drinks the nationalistic propagandistic Kool-Aid,
but Bruno is conflicted. As he steals food for his new friend, and plays games with him, his bond with Shmuel grows deeper, awakening
senses of moral impulse that Bruno didn’t even know he had. How will this
secret friendship play out?
Photographed by Benoit Delhomme (The Proposition), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas isn’t designed in as crushingly bleak a fashion as something like Lajos Koltai’s monochromatic Fateless,
a fellow Holocaust tale told from the perspective of a young boy. With
wide angles and uncluttered frames, screenwriter-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) aims for a more naturalistic palette, to underscore the movie’s humanistic tone. What most helps the film, though, is the wide-eyed Butterfield. Physically resembling a cross between a young Elijah Wood and Son of Rambow‘s
Bill Milner, Butterfield wonderfully captures Bruno’s naivete without ever
tipping over into affected cuteness. The rest of the performances are
nicely modulated as well. The pitfall of many World War II films is
that they try to retell a grand story on a cramped canvas, but The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tells a discrete, moving, standalone tale from a specific point-of-view, and just tells it quite well.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas comes presented in 1:85:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. An audio commentary track with Herman and author Boyne anchors the supplemental bonus features, and the two are quite complimentary of the other’s work. The same pair also offer brief, optional interjections over a small clutch of deleted scenes, most of which expand upon the movie’s set-apart rural setting and young Bruno’s increasing boredom in only rudimentary ways. Finally, there’s a 20-minute behind-the-scenes featurette which intercuts cast and crew interviews about the production, and shows how Herman, in tweaking the perspective of the novel, balanced the personal tale of Bruno and the sensitive reality of one of the darkest periods in world history. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)