I can't believe there's no thread for this already! This incredible film releases today in the UK (USA in November).

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is eight-year-old boy in wartime Berlin. His officer father Ralph (David Thewlis), a loving husband and father as well as a good soldier has just been promoted and a party is being held to celebrate. He has become an Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to a Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS, the part of the German forces that were unswervingly loyal to Hitler, earning him the disapproval of his mother (Sheila Hancock). Ralph’s new posting is in Poland and he is taking the family with him.

From his bedroom window in their new house, Bruno sees what he assumes is a farm. At first he thinks there will be new friends for him there, but he’s puzzled by how strange the farmers must be, since they all wear striped pyjamas. As the days pass, Bruno becomes increasingly bored, but he is banned from exploring the garden at the back of the house. One day, he grabs a chance to sneak into the garden, through the window of the shed and into the woods beyond. Soon he reaches the camp fence where he meets Schmuel (Jack Scanlon), a Jewish boy of the same age.


It's based on the bestselling novel by John Boyne, first published in 2006. Boyne has been criticised for telling the story from a German perspective rather than a Jewish one. Be he has a strong reason for doing so:



Screenwriter/Director Mark Herman obtained the rights to film the book (after the disaster of Hope Springs - amusing to hear him admit that it was rubbish recently) and teamed up with producer David Heyman, who had been wanting to make a film of it for some time. They realised the difficulties of the project because of how sensitive the subject matter is, but both are convinced, like Boyne, that the horror of the Holocaust something that every generation must understand so that it is never repeated.

Herman and his team were committed to being as authentic as possible to the period and the realities of death camps, although the story is fictional. In fact, the biggest digression from authenticity was having a boy of Schmuel’s age living in the camp: the vast majority of children arriving at death camps were immediately sent to the gas chambers.. (I'm being extra twitchy on the spoiler tags here - watch it without prior knowledge of the story if you can.)

This is the most important film of the year, for my money, though not necessarily the best in purely filmic terms. Brilliant performances from David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga as Bruno's parents. The two young boys, Asa Butterfield and Jack Scanlon are good; Butterfield's sweet innocence works well. James Horner's score is excellent, as is the cinematography.

The book is written for children (9 or 10 up, I would say) and I'd love to take my 10-year-old to it, but I know he'd find it too distressing. He needs to be distressed by the Holocaust at some point soon, but I'm not sure he's quite ready to handle it yet.

The official site is here and my article is here.

I'd clocked it as one to see. With a bit of luck everyone else might start talking about it by 2010!

Matt

I'll be interested to know what you think of it.

Friends over the water: don't miss the press screenings of this one!

FWIW, and for the search engine's benefit, the American title appears to be The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

Oh, and good to have you back, Tony!

Thanks Peter. Love the new avatar. My boys will be delighted when I show them.

Cutest wiki ever: pjs

Is "pyjamas" a British spelling? I'm not trying to be cute; I've never seen the word spelled that way.

Yes, I've seen it in British books before.

I'm seeing a screening of this in October (which is why I didn't click on your spoiler text, Tony!). Glad to hear it's so good!

FWIW, according to Wikipedia:

The word "pyjama" was incorporated into the English language from Hindustani (the progenitor language of modern-day Urdu and Hindi). The word originally derives from the Persian word پايجامه Payjama meaning "leg garment."

Nice to have a thread that focuses on the central issue.

But this isn't it!

Here's a hint for people who've not seen the film yet: don't get too caught up on the word pyjamas/pajamas.

You mean it's not about sleeping?

Well, it is in one sense. The Holocaust happened for many reasons, but part of the reason, surely, is that the nation effectively slept while Hitler fed them a powerfully presented pack of lies. It was easier for people to follow on with whatever they were told than to ask questions or really think about what was happening. If you wait until the end of this week or early next, we'll have published a Culturewatch.tv video on the film which includes a soundbite from Vera Farmiga talking about a line in John Boyne's novel which, for her was the key to understanding her character. The son, Bruno says of their move, 'I don't think this was a good idea.' His mother replies, 'We don't have the luxury of thinking.'

This, for me, is why this film is so important. We all - and especially younger people - need to learn how important it is not to sleep when evil begins to be tolerated by a society.

Seeing it tonight

Matt

Still processing this one having just got back. Enjoyed your insights Tony. A few things to say at this point. Firstly what an ending. Totally expected them to get there in time but they didn't horrible.

Secondly I love the way the filmmakers get you to side with the Germans early on. The film opens with an alluring red screen, but it gradually becomes apparent that this alluring red is part of the Nazi flagm and there's a moment of repulsion (for me at least). Then we get the fact that the accents are so quintessentially English. No German with subtitles, or English with an accent.

Also I was interested that the family maid looks like she too could be Jewish - in fact the young soldier looks a her in a suspicious way at one point. And the line about how that same soldier is unlucky to be sent away because it's his father rather than his mother that has their doubts.

Surprised to hear that it's a children's novel. The closing scenes make this more of a 12 than a 12A in my book. .

I was also struck by the themes of imprisonment in the new house. That odd staircase, Bruno's windows boarded up the fence surrounding the compound and so on. And some of the more eery moment are when Father makes impassioned pleas for certain things and there's a horrible and almost persuasive to what he says.

At the same time something doesn't quite ring right. All I can think of at the moment is how plausible it would be for a boy to be able to sit for so long unobserved by the fence, and whether someone from either side of the fence could dig under it so easily..

Anyway.


Matt

I thought this was very well done. Bruno and his friends pretending to be ME109s was wonderfully - though uncomfortably - normal, realising that at the same time there would have been British boys pretending to be Spitfires and Hurricanes. Straight English accents feel more authentic than English in German accents, somehow. I guess hearing the accent from actors I know are English introduces an extra layer of obvious pretence. I think I didn't appreciate at the time quite how gently we're introduced to Ralph ,because I knew the story, but we don't discover he's an officer until the party.


Missed this.

This is an ironic comment about Ralph's mother rather than Kotler's. The point really is that because Ralph is an Obersturmbannfuhrer, rather than a mere Obersturmfuhrer, he can get away with having a parent who is critical of the Reich. The loyalty of Ralph's father possibly comes into this too. Thewlis says that the back story that they developed for his father was that he was an arms dealer, perhaps helping to explain why Ralph has risen so far as an officer already.


Definitely. It's a wondefully stark house (Bauhaus design? Well-chosen in terms of style and severity, but if it is Bauhaus, I would have thought it unlikely to be found in Poland where all the death camps were). And Bruno is imprisoned in the front garden. It's as if the front garden and the house itself define the boundaries of what is acceptable for people to think. Beyond it is reality.



Yes. I had less problem with the first, given the pile of concrete in the corner. It is perhaps just conceivable that an 8-year-old slipping away might be tolerated by a guard who has children of his own. But the security was too light altogether. There would have been more guards supervising the work teams I would have thought. What about guards on the perimeter, watch towers, etc.? I also thought that the fence wouldn't be so close to the woods - there would surely have been a wide area outside. And yes, Bruno was able to dig very fast - sandy soil I guess. But I could live with these problems because of the story they made possible. John Boyne describes it as a 'fable'. Tragically, the biggest divergence from reality, according to Mark Herman, was that the children were almost always taken straight to the gas chambers when they arrived at death camps, though there are a couple of exceptions like two children at Treblinca who were kept to feed the ducks.

Oh, man. I got out of the screening a few hours ago, and I think I'm still shaking. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything so brutal -- and without any overt violence or a drop of gore (well, hardly any). I felt exactly like I'd been hit. Man, oh, man.

Tony, for the love of heaven, don't even THINK of taking your 10-year-old to that! If I'd seen that film when I was ten, I'd have flung myself off the nearest ledge!!

FWIW, I got an e-mail from the Canadian publicist today telling me, among other things: "The film contains several important Christian messages and tackles a difficult topic with great sensitivity." It's rare that a secular publicist comes looking for me specifically because I write for the Christian media -- usually, if a studio thinks a film might have Christian appeal, they hire a Christian PR firm like Grace Hill Media etc. to come after critics like me -- so of course, my interest was piqued. I am wondering if anyone here can comment on what these "important Christian messages" might be?

That's why I was there -- my boss got the same sort of message from Grace Hill. (Fortunately, he went too and had to suffer with me!) I'm not sure about the specifically Christian messages, although I do know that the 10 plagues of Egypt and what happened to Pharaoh came to mind. The only person who mentioned Jesus was the nasty Nazi sister, although it was before she became a Nazi. But I did hear they're preparing a Bible study to go with it.

ETA: Giving it a little more thought, I can see how one might discern some Christian messages woven into it, such as the power of forgiveness and love, and the consequences of sin. One coworker of mine pointed out that what Bruno does at the end reminded her of the way Jesus identified Himself with us out of love.

I've done a blog post on the movie (no spoilers).

http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/2008/10/the-boy-in-the.html

(Since this is an international discussion board, and the film has been playing in Europe for over a month already... and I hear it opened in Israel yesterday...)

Hate to say, I didn't find the film quite THAT brilliant or heartbreaking.

Well, with one exception. The scene with the potato-peeler got the tears welling up, for me. At a certain point, I knew exactly what his "secret" would be -- it was kind of inevitable, in a film like this, given how a certain scene was going. But oh, the way the actor played that scene. Oh, indeed.

I wish the rest of the film had been like that scene. But it wasn't. It's good, but not great.

My immediate reaction to the film, once it was over, was to see it as a kind of anti-Life Is Beautiful. Both films are "fables" about boys who think the Holocaust is just a game -- but there are huge, huge differences in terms of why the boys make this mistake, who is deceiving them and why, and where it all goes from there.

Thinking of the film as a "fable" in that sense makes it easier to appreciate, for me. It means I no longer have to ask if there really WOULDN'T have been any guards checking the perimeter of that camp. (If there had been, then surely the two boys could not have met so frequently, without interruption.) But it also means the film is a somewhat "lighter" experience than it arguably should be.

I know, I know, it sounds unfathomable that I should say that, given the ending. But honestly, at a certain point, I realized that the story had to -- HAD TO -- end the way it did, because anything else would have felt like cheating, and anything else would have robbed the movie of its fable-like point. I daresay it even got to the point where I "wanted" the film to end the way that it did, just because it felt like the inevitable, required thing to do in a fable like this. But seeing the film in those terms deprived the ending, somewhat, of the emotional force that it really should have had. And yes, I went through that whole thought process while the extended montage went on, with the Jews being herded over here and the family running over there. That sequence did last quite a while -- to build suspense, I assume, but it also gave me time to THINK about the sequence and where it was headed. It gave me time to "get used to" the outcome, before it had actually happened.

BTW, are we supposed to think that the propaganda film was shot in THIS camp? Or do the camps simply resemble each other? I ask because, last I checked, the Nazis did set up "model camps" precisely so that they could be used in propaganda films, but they never shot the films in the camps where the actual killing was happening.

MattPage wrote:
: Secondly I love the way the filmmakers get you to side with the Germans early on. . . . Then we get the fact that the accents are so quintessentially English. No German with subtitles, or English with an accent.

Interesting. Yeah, that does create sympathy, doesn't it? Especially now that David Thewlis is known for playing supportive characters in films like Harry Potter and Kingdom of Heaven. He's not the go-to bad guy that he was in the '90s any more. (Gary Oldman has gone through a similar shift in persona.)

: At the same time something doesn't quite ring right. All I can think of at the moment is how plausible it would be for a boy to be able to sit for so long unobserved by the fence, and whether someone from either side of the fence could dig under it so easily..

Yeah, exactly.

Tony Watkins wrote:
: John Boyne describes it as a 'fable'.

Ah, he beat me to it.

: Tragically, the biggest divergence from reality, according to Mark Herman, was that the children were almost always taken straight to the gas chambers when they arrived at death camps, though there are a couple of exceptions like two children at Treblinca who were kept to feed the ducks.

Huh. What was the age limit on this? I seem to recall Anne Frank spent some time in the camps before dying -- she wasn't killed straight away (and she might not have been "killed", even; if memory serves, she may have died of sickness, rather than outright execution). But she was in her early teens then, I think. Maybe preteens. (Haven't checked yet.)

Interesting that this device "works" on your side of the Atlantic too, although it's probably most effective to an English audience.

Matt

MattPage wrote:
: Interesting that this device "works" on your side of the Atlantic too, although it's probably most effective to an English audience.

Well, keep in mind, I'm Canadian, and we Canucks have kept in better touch with our British roots than our neighbours to the south.

I wonder how this device will play in Valkyrie, where all the Nazi officers who conspire to assassinate Hitler seem to be played by Brits (Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, etc.) -- except for Tom Cruise. Will the movie "define" the character in a way that might explain why THIS Nazi speaks with a different accent than all the other ones? Or will this just be one of those things that the movie trusts us to ignore? (And what if Hitler himself becomes a character in the film, as the trailer hints he might? How would HIS accent be handled?)

At the risk of seeming like a heartless cur (moi?) ... the trailer for this movie makes it look like a real stinkeroo -- BECAUSE OF WINN DACHAU. I will acknowledge being the ultra-cynical type who runs fleeing from movies that inspire praise that uses the phrase "triumph of the human spirit." Test: I hate TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in all its permutations. Should I even bother?

vjmorton wrote:
: At the risk of seeming like a heartless cur (moi?) ... the trailer for this movie makes it look like a real stinkeroo -- BECAUSE OF WINN DACHAU.

Ha!

FWIW, I gather that, in the book, the camp in question is Auschwitz, but I don't believe the movie ever specifies that.

: I will acknowledge being the ultra-cynical type who runs fleeing from movies that inspire praise that uses the phrase "triumph of the human spirit."

Has anyone actually been saying that? I didn't get that vibe off of this film at ALL.

: Test: I hate TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in all its permutations. Should I even bother?

Never seen TKaM (though I read the book in high school), so I couldn't say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5FU-yDC-uI

Going by the trailer music, by the tags "the lines the divide us" (cue Nazi salute) and "the hope that unites us" (cue hand shake thru barbed wire). Those lines also are on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2044105728/tt0914798">the movie's one-sheet.</a> The specific phrase "triumph of the human spirit" re this film comes from the people at Truly Moving Films, in a bit that that Jeffrey Overstreet linked to (not the note that he himself reprinted).

There's also the "demystification of the father" (is there anything more cliche in this day and age) and the "SOLDIERS FIGHT WARS!!!!" yelling debates. And it's directed by Mark Herman, whose BRASSED OFF I detested as the work of a hack pamphleteer, a poor-man's Ken Loach.

vjmorton wrote:
: Going by the trailer music, by the tags "the lines the divide us" (cue Nazi salute) and "the hope that unites us" (cue hand shake thru barbed wire).

Hmmm. The trailer music doesn't suggest "triumph" to me. The "hope" bit is a bit odd, though, yeah. Part of the point of the film is that the children -- especially the Nazi officer's son -- are too innocent (i.e. ignorant) to know what's going on, so they don't feel a particular need to fear or "hope" for anything.

: The specific phrase "triumph of the human spirit" re this film comes from the people at Truly Moving Films, in a bit that that Jeffrey Overstreet linked to (not the note that he himself reprinted).

Ah, I haven't read that.

: And it's directed by Mark Herman, whose BRASSED OFF I detested as the work of a hack pamphleteer, a poor-man's Ken Loach.

Heh. I won't quibble with that one too much. The only other film of his I think I've seen is Little Voice, which I remember thinking was okay.

It is a brilliant scene, but I stand by my initial feelings about the film as a whole.


Yes, the propaganda film was shot in the camp. We don't know that when we see it, but when Bruno and Schmuel are running through the camp, or perhaps when they are being herded along, Bruno sees a place where some children had been filmed playing.


Anne Frank was in Bergen-Belsen, which was a concentration camp (arbeitslager) but not a death camp (todeslager). There were six main death camps, all in Poland. Tens of thousands died in Bergen-Belsen, not because of gas chambers but because of sickness. It was a 'recovery camp', where the sickest inmates of other camps were sent (including, oddly, several thousand women from Ausschwitz). When the Brits liberated the camp, there there 13,000 unburied corpses lying around, and many of the living so sick that they just lay among the bodies.

Being a cynical type as well, I never really trust trailers - 'cos usually they're put together by marketing people who are trying to reach the largest possible audience, even if that audience won't enjoy the film they've been conned into seeing.

But do you really hate TKaMB? Dare I ask why? And is that just the film, the book and the film, or the film because you liked the book?

Matt

<Digression>

I enjoyed Brassed Off a lot, though I haven't seen it in years. The history of the mine closures in the UK is immensely important, and so I suspect that this film doesn't work anywhere near as well outside these shores. It's based on the closure of one of the most iconic of British mines, the Grimethorpe Colliery. It was iconic because the colliery brass band was (and remains, though the pit has gone) one of the most well-known bands in the country. The link between brass bands and mining is also very strong in the British psyche. Brassed Off captured very well the nature of the problem, and the implications for people within the mining communities. It went down particularly well in those communities because it was felt that it was so true to their experience. You may find it difficult to believe, given your assessment of it, but for many Brits - unashamedly including me - this is a powerfully emotional, even tear-jerking, film.

A more light-hearted Ken Loach, perhaps, rather than a poor-man's version. I hold the execrable Hope Springs against him, but Brassed Off is a feather in his cap as far as I'm concerned.
</Digression>

So I'm the only person who found this film detestable?

The press woman found me before the screening started and asked me to give her a reaction afterward. I don't always do that, because I don't often have immediate feelings, pro or con, the second the credits begin to roll. But after Striped Pajamas, I made a beeline for her. "I have something to say," I sputtered, angrily. "There's a special circle of hell reserved for the people who made this film."

I shouldn't have gone that far, but I was pissed. Turns out she'd misheard me. "There's a special circle of hell for the people who brought their young children to this press screening?" she asked, thinking that would confirm what I'd just said. No, not them - although why anyone would bring young kids to this movie is beyond me.

What exactly was it that was so horrible? Story? Acting?

Whoa, strong reaction, Christian! What was detestable about it? I can understand reasons why people might not like it as a film, or take issue with the way the story has been framed. But to see Herman & co, and presumably John Boyne the author, as deserving hell is a rather extreme thing to express.

Yes, that was hyperbole. I don't honestly wish anyone to go to hell, but was searching for a way to express my contempt for the film.

Here's what bugs me. Please let me know if I'm WAY off-base: Six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust, and I'm supposed to get all broken up about one gentile boy who lost his life because of a series of factors that amount to a case of mistaken identity? Maybe that's simplistic, but come on.

Tony, I don't know if you track cinema trends here in the States, but my review will point out the abysmal trend of the 1980s and 1990s to show the plight of blacks through the eyes of white protagonists. Some of these films were decent enough -- one ("Driving Miss Daisy") even won Best Picture of the Year, although it was widely derided by prominent African American filmmakers. That someone would now make a picture about the Holocaust, about which we've already had numerous films, some of which have been greatly effective, and show it through the eyes of an endangered boy whose dad is a Nazi, then ask us to feel the horror of the situation when that boy gets gassed, is one of the more detestable, condescending "lessons" I can remember seeing/learning at the cinema.

Christian, you're not alone in your objections.

Thanks, Nick, but Lisa's objections seem to be focused on the story's outcome, not so much its perspective. I'm bothered more by the latter, although the former is pretty horrific. You can see where the story is going well before it gets to the end, and you wonder if the filmmakers are really going to go through with it (the story is based on a book, which I believe the filmmakers adhered to). At one point, after the climactic event, when it isn't quite sure whether the worst has happened, a black woman in the theater behind me, during a very quiet moment, said out loud to her companions, "They all dead." I stifled a laugh -- her blunt assessment struck me as funny, given the film's amped up cross-cutting during that sequence and swelling "soundtrack of horror." And I wondered what people were supposed to think as they left the theater -- what the "take home" message was supposed to be. "Poor little boy. So sad that he had to pay for the sins of his Nazi dad." But what about the 6 million Jews?

I was with you until TKaM. I am put off by the Disneyfication of race, but I bracket all that out just to get to the Halloween scene.

I haven't seen this yet, Christian, but it sounds like it shares in the problems that crippled Life is Beautiful and Schindler's List (to a slightly lesser degree). It is such a shameful use of historical memory. There is a reason why films like Night and Fog and Shoah are still considered the only legitimate Holocaust films, as the event is as unrepresentable as it is unthinkable.

Alright, I guess the TKaM comparison does work.

This review seems to agree with you.

Yeah, that's more in line with my feelings. I see that Greencine has a roundup. The Indiewire excerpts are spot on.

Wow. Someone that likes Life is Beautiful as little as I do. Thanks for that link.

It's been brought to my attention that some prominent Jews have screened the film and have been deeply moved -- not offended -- by it. Here's a quote that really stands out. I can't say I get where this guy is coming from, but it's certainly pointed (at me!):

NCSY – David Frankel (Associate International Director): "The emotional impact of this spectacular film makes it that much more incumbent on all peoples of conscience and faith to resist the temptation of drawing moral equivalences between the loss of innocence suffered during World War II by the children of Nazi barbarians and the loss of life suffered by six million innocent Jewish civilians as a consequence of the Nazi regime's systematic attempt at Jewish genocide."

So if it were a less emotional film, that temptation would be legitimate? I am not sure how this negates your initial critique. Spielberg, whose film is decried by much of Holocaust film studies, is also the namesake of the DC museum's film archive. The debate is continual, but your critique has a great deal of learned Jewish precedent.

vjmorton, one more thought re: the "SOLDIERS FIGHT WARS!!!!" lined. The point of that line, even in the trailer, is not that soldiers have to defend the fact that they fight for their country, but rather, that THIS soldier is not FIGHTING anybody, he is merely involved in racial extermination. The soldier defends what he does as "part of" the war, but his wife isn't buying it. That's all.

Tony Watkins wrote:
: Yes, the propaganda film was shot in the camp.

Ah, so another departure from history, then.

: I enjoyed Brassed Off a lot, though I haven't seen it in years. The history of the mine closures in the UK is immensely important, and so I suspect that this film doesn't work anywhere near as well outside these shores.

FWIW, I suspect that vjmorton is of British stock. (I can't recall whether he has ever spelled this out, as such, in his reviews, but a number of his comments seem to point in that direction; cf. the bit in his blurb on Elizabeth: The Golden Age where he says "every British Catholic grows up knowing what a 'priest hole' is" ... oh wait, there, he also writes: "like most British Catholics, I really do have pretty thick skin about British history, thicker than a lot of St. Blogs’s Americans. But this pissed off even me.")

Christian wrote:
: Here's what bugs me. Please let me know if I'm WAY off-base: Six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust, and I'm supposed to get all broken up about one gentile boy who lost his life because of a series of factors that amount to a case of mistaken identity? Maybe that's simplistic, but come on.

I didn't feel a need to get "all broken up" about it. I thought it was more a sort of comeuppance for the gentile father who made/let it happen. I don't think the film is about "the plight of Jews" as much as it is about the dangers of "innocence" (and its grown-up corollary, "denial").

It's especially pertinent, one might argue, in this day and age when many people are wilfully "innocent" or in "denial" about what their own countries are doing.

: And I wondered what people were supposed to think as they left the theater -- what the "take home" message was supposed to be.

Me too. Life Is Beautiful works as a "fable" ABOUT denial because it IS an act of denial. But The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a "fable" about innocence slowly caving in to the truth, yet you have to suspend disbelief and accept so many non-realistic aspects of the film that the whole dawning-of-the-truth aspect is kind of undermined.

I think where I disagree with Christian and others is that you seem to assume that there is only one side of the Holocaust story to tell (i.e. the Jewish side), but this film is really about the German side of it. So yeah there's a degree of horror in the ending, but the real horror is how people that initally appear to be decent and normal end up perpetuating such attrocities. I'm not conversant with Holocaust studies, or even with Driving Miss Daisy, so if that sounds ignorant excuse me. I think I know what you mean about the 1980s and 1990s films which "show the plight of blacks through the eyes of white protagonists", and I haven't seen that many of them, but the ones I have seen usually protagonists=heroes right? Where this one differs is that the protagonists (excepting the eponymous "boy") are the bad guys. It's like Downfall in that sense, only primarily aimed at British (speaking?) audiences.

I'm not saying that the film is flawless, or that the way the film develops the friendship between the two boys in the last half hour doesn't undermine some of the other bits, but even then it's more about the lies told to the German child (I'm surprised that Tony needed give a reminder about the scene where the boy sees where the children in the film have been playing), than about the suffering of the Jews.

The film could, perhaps have filled out the father, his relationship with his wife and his soldiers more, but I think this questioning of how this awful thing happened, rather than what happen and what it's significance is, is the heart of the film.

That's a bit off the cuff so please go easy on me!

Matt

MattPage wrote:
: . . . I'm surprised that Tony needed give a reminder about the scene where the boy sees where the children in the film have been playing . . .

It wasn't a "reminder", so much as a confirmation that the exact arrangement of skipping stones in one scene was identical to the exact arrangement of skipping stones in the other scene. I wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be the Exact Same Place (which would have been impossible, historically), or simply a very similar kind of place that made Bruno stop and pause and think for a moment.

Oh I see.

Thanks

Matt

I knew Manohla Dargis had trashed this movie, but until today, I hadn't seen Richard Schickel's review:

I don't think I've seen — at least since equally offensive concentration camp fable, Life Is Beautiful — a movie so reliant on human stupidity to achieve its effect, so totally dishonest in its insistence on that quality (which it presents as innocence) to achieve its narrative goals. Bruno and Shmuel may be only eight years old, but that is well past the age of reason, and they are caught up in situation that would force anyone to acquire a shrewdness well in advance of their years. I don't know if a movie as simpleminded and emotionally shameless as this one definitively proves that fiction is not a suitable vehicle for the consideration of crimes as vast as the Holocaust. But it will do until the next historical travesty comes along.

I think Dargis' review gets closer to my own take -- being offended by the film's focus -- but Schickel finds the plot machinations so preposterous he can't take the film at all seriously. I've noted a few reviews that mention the lack of guards along the perimeter of the camp, but nothing like Schickel's.

The film is still "fresh" at Rotten Tomatoes.

Barbara Niccolosi's take.

I had directed Barbara to this board before she had written her review, and I believe she added this paragraph as a result:

There is a little bit of controversy about this film. Critics seem to be annoyed that it derives its central tension from the threat to one little German boy, as opposed to the millions of Jews. This criticism seems to me to be idiotic. Every movie derives its power by foregrounding the problems of one or two little people. In this case, the point of the film is to point a finger of condemnation at the German grown-ups here, who thought they could "handle" the evil they were dabbling in. In the end, it becomes a snowball rolling down hill that has the same effect as in the life of the Pharoah Ramsees when he perpetrated evil on the Hebrew people. If you do evil, it will consume you...or at least your children.

FWIW.

Pointed criticism from Barbara? I feel like I've joined the Big Leagues!

To be fair, it's just the one critic -- me -- who seems put off by what she attributes to "critics." But there are obviously other offensive angles and elements in this movie, whether or not one agrees with my take on the film.

EDIT: Just read the review. Oh.My.Goodness:

The film is not at all graphic, but the end is very disturbing. The people sat in the theater silent during the credits. The ladies behind me were wiping away tears. But I think everybody needs to see it. ESPECIALLY this week when so many Christians have seen their way to compromising with the greatest social evil of our day - abortion. Our people voted to overlook a little thing like the slaughter of the unborn, because of other considerations like economic prosperity, climate change and the desire to have all the other nations in the world like us again. This kind of a choice gets a very dramatic and cautionary treatment in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

I walked out of the theater ashamed of my country, and for the first time in any Holocaust movie, seeing in the German people not a scapegoat of history, but people just like us Americans in 2008. Only we will get judged harsher then they will, eh? Because we had their mistakes to study. My thought as I drove away in my car was, "The only real lesson of history is that people never learn from it."

I will not comment on this, other than to say I can go with what she's saying ... to a point. But ... Obama voters are just like the Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, because they overlooked the holocaust of abortion and focused on other issues? There's a lot to unpack there. Don't think I'm gonna touch it.

No further responses on this film, which expanded last week successfully to over 400 theaters, pulling in more than $4,000 per screen.

The movie is running ads on Crosswalk, but I hadn't realized there was a full-court press among other religious outlets. This morning I listened to "Focus on the Family" and heard an ad inserted between FOTF and the program that follows ("Family Life Today") for "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas."

I am stunned that a movie this serious has been pushed this hard, to this audience, but overall, I think that's healthy. What's incredibly *disturbing* is how they keep promoting the film as appropriate for families, etc. I guess if you want to leave the theater traumatized, and maybe give your kids nightmares, this is the sort of "serious" film that qualifies. But Lord have mercy on those who take up the advice.

I continue to feel strongly that this film, whether one thinks it's well made, is in no way appropriate for younger viewers. OK, yes, maybe teenagers, but the commercials don't really make that distinction. I do wonder if the religious audience is turning out for the film, or if its grosses are being pushed by secular audiences.

This is a practical application of Holocaust studies to films like this. Is it worth using Holocaust imagery to teach children moral lessons? The Holocaust is so awful that in such a process one of the two components will end up getting watered down, either the Holocaust imagery or the moral lesson. To water down either is a travesty.