Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas arrived in UK cinemas on 12 September 2008, adapted from John Boyne’s 2006 novel of the same name. It runs 94 minutes. It stars Asa Butterfield as Bruno, Vera Farmiga as his mother Elsa, David Thewlis as his father Ralf, and Jack Scanlon as Shmuel. It was released in North America as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. The tagline reads: “Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us.” That line tells you most of what you need to know about the film’s instincts, and most of what is wrong with them.
Trailer, via The Movie Planet.
Bruno Leaves Berlin
The setup is efficient. Bruno is eight years old and living in Berlin when his father, an SS officer, is promoted. The family is uprooted to the countryside. Bruno notices an extermination camp from his bedroom window but believes it to be a farm, because nobody has told him otherwise. His mother forbids him from going in the back garden.
Ralf arranges for Herr Liszt, a private tutor, to home school Bruno and his elder sister Gretel. Liszt’s anti-semitic teachings land on Gretel alongside her crush on her father’s subordinate, Lieutenant Kurt Kotler, and together they turn her into a fanatical Nazi supporter. Bruno struggles to absorb the racist rhetoric, particularly after Pavel, a doctor-turned-family slave, tends to a minor injury he suffers.
This is the film’s strongest stretch. Herman stages the indoctrination as domestic noise, something happening in adjacent rooms while a child fails to listen. Butterfield plays Bruno as unremarkable, which is the correct choice.
The Fence and Shmuel
Bruno’s explorations of the nearby woods take him to a barbed wire fence surrounding the camp. On the other side is Shmuel, a boy his age, a Jew brought to the camp with his parents. They meet at the fence regularly. Bruno sneaks him food.
The friendship is the engine of the film, and it is also where The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas starts making decisions it cannot defend. Two eight-year-olds on opposite sides of a fence, talking through wire, is a clean image. Clean images are the problem. The camp in this film is a backdrop with a boy behind it, and the boy behind it exists to teach the boy in front of it something.
Scanlon gives Shmuel a quiet watchfulness that the script does not always earn. He is the more interesting performance of the two, because he has less to do and does it without asking for sympathy.
Kotler, Pavel and the Wine
Kotler inadvertently reveals to Elsa that the smell from the camp is from the crematoria. She angrily confronts her husband. When Kotler reveals his father left Germany for Switzerland to avoid national service, Ralf berates him, and Kotler in turn beats Pavel for spilling a glass of wine.
That sequence is the film at its most honest. Violence in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is mostly implied, mostly offscreen, mostly a smell or a sound or a bruise. Rupert Friend plays Kotler as a man whose cruelty is administrative rather than theatrical, and David Hayman’s Pavel carries the weight of a life already over.
Then Bruno sees Shmuel working in his home and offers him cake. Kotler finds them talking and berates Shmuel. After seeing him eating, Shmuel tells Kotler that Bruno offered the cake. Bruno fearfully denies it. It is the one moment the film allows its protagonist to be a coward, and it is the best-written scene in the picture.
The Propaganda Film
Shmuel does not reappear at the fence for several days. Bruno tries to apologise. A short time after, he clandestinely watches his father and other officers reviewing a propaganda film depicting the camp’s conditions as positive. Shmuel eventually reappears at the fence, with visible injuries. Bruno apologises. Shmuel forgives him.
That forgiveness is where the film’s moral accounting goes soft. A Jewish child forgives the son of an SS officer for a betrayal, and the film treats this as grace rather than as the asymmetry it is. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas wants to be about innocence meeting innocence. It keeps running into the fact that one of these children is a prisoner and the other is not.
Vera Farmiga’s Elsa is the adult performance that holds. Her confrontation with Ralf over the crematoria is the only scene where an adult in this film is permitted to understand what is happening and to be destroyed by it.
What the Scholars Got Right
The film received generally positive reviews from critics for its emotional weight, mature themes and acting. It was panned by scholars for misrepresenting elements of the Holocaust. Both reactions are legible in the same 94 minutes.
The scholarly objection is not pedantry. A fable about a German boy’s moral awakening at the fence of an extermination camp asks the audience to identify with the person least endangered by it. The film’s emotional payoff depends on that identification, and the payoff is the point.
Here is the running order of what the film gives you, and what it asks you to feel at each stage:
| Beat | What happens | What the film wants |
|---|---|---|
| Berlin | Ralf promoted, family uprooted | Disorientation |
| The window | Bruno mistakes camp for a farm | Innocence |
| The tutor | Liszt teaches; Gretel converts | Dread |
| Pavel’s injury | Doctor-slave tends Bruno | Unease |
| The fence | Bruno meets Shmuel | Connection |
| The wine | Kotler beats Pavel | Horror |
| The cake | Bruno denies Shmuel | Shame |
| The propaganda film | Officers watch a lie | Complicity |
| The apology | Shmuel forgives Bruno | Redemption |
That last row is the one that should bother you. Redemption is the wrong transaction at that fence.
A Fable That Flatters
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is well made. Herman directs with restraint, the runtime is tight, and the cast is doing serious work. The problem is not craft. The problem is the shape of the story itself.
A fable works when the simplification reveals something true. This one simplifies by making the Holocaust legible through the confusion of a child who is not its victim, and then resolves that confusion with a friendship that costs him nothing until the plot decides otherwise. The film’s final movement depends on Bruno’s dangerous journey inside the camp’s walls, and the danger is his. Shmuel has been in danger the entire time. He does not get a journey. He gets a fence and a visitor.
That is the trade the film makes, and it is a bad one. It is not that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is offensive. It is that it is comfortable. It offers an audience a child to worry about who looks like the audience, and a child to mourn who exists mainly to make the first child’s worry meaningful.
Where the Fence Leads
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas earns its place as a well-acted, tightly built drama about a German family in Nazi Germany. As a film about the Holocaust, it is a failure of proportion. The acting is real, the restraint is real, and the central device is a softener. It asks you to feel the right things for the wrong reasons, and it gets away with it because the right things are genuinely worth feeling.
Watch it for Butterfield, Farmiga and Hayman. Watch it knowing that the fence is doing more work than the film admits. The published critical score is 5.5/10, and that is about right: a competent film with a moral structure that does not hold up under any pressure at all.
5.5 of 10.
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