The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

In a film about the holocaust you might reasonably expect to come away from it with some sense of what it meant in 1940s Europe to be a) German and b) Jewish. But in the case of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, you come away with a much stronger sense of what it means in the early twenty-first century to be a student of the holocaust.

Like Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, the conceit mushrooms out of a child’s perspective. Bruno, the son of a senior Nazi stationed to a polish death camp, explores the edges of his naivety by sniffing a bit too closely to the barbed-wire fencing. There he strikes up a friendship with the incarcerated, stripy, and surprisingly hungry Schmuel, who sits forlornly in the corner of a corralled area of land that generates strange-smelling smoke. Bruno’s parents try to provide sanitised answers to his growing curiosity, but with tragic consequences.

It’s not hard to see why the plot captured the imagination of the film’s backers. But the problem is in its delivery. The moral significance of the subject matter means that the film makers have treated the whole project with kid gloves. This leaves everything feeling a little contrived, as though each creative decision takes its cue from something written in a respectable historical or philosophical study of the subject. In other words, it comes with footnotes.

Because the characters are cut from the same cloth of the received wisdom that governs the moral trajectory of the story they lack depth and dimension. Instead they come across as pawns, drawn only for the purpose of making the lesson a little easier to understand. David Thewlis’ attempts to justify himself to his wife sound at times like an educational film for GCSE students.

But without plausible characters that convey something – however idiosyncratic – of the racial, political, and cultural tension unique to the period, the substance of the film collapses, and becomes as platitudinous as the sermonising of an Anglican vicar. It is the depiction of characters, albeit in different forms and styles,in films such as Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, and Schindler’s List that superimposes something to which others can relate against an impersonal landscape covered only with the snow of human ash.