DVD Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas on Buena Vista Entertainment

From "the studio that brought you the Academy Award-winning Life Is Beautiful" comes another Holocaust movie that you're sure to love!

The Boy in the Striped PajamasMark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas uses the viewpoint of childhood naïvete to critique the absurdities of the Holocaust. Problem is, these absurdities should already be pretty clear to the modern viewer, so such an approach seems, at best, misguided. Rather than attempt to present the horrors of WWII with any kind of contemporary immediacy, Herman uses the historical lapse of 60-odd years to inject an ironic distance between viewer and subject and make the dominant viewpoints of the Nazis seem ridiculously quaint. Then the film’s sepia-toned glaze gives the picture the look of a museum piece, so that even as Herman ratchets up the hysteria for a final bit of on-screen horror, it seems sufficiently removed in time to shield the viewer from any direct engagement with the horrific events being shown.

In the film’s fanciful conceit, eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield), whose father is a high-ranking Nazi officer, moves with his family to a military outpost next to a death camp. Lacking the companionship of other young boys, he wanders off against his parent’s orders to the camp and strikes up a (very) unlikely friendship with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a young Jewish prisoner, the two communicating through the gaps in the barbed-wire fencing. Soon the lessons Bruno has imbibed through his father’s propaganda rub up against the empirical evidence of his interactions with his new friend: “Isn’t there such a thing as a nice Jew?” the confused Bruno asks his tutor after visiting Shmuel. At first hopelessly naïve (he can’t understand why the prisoner who peels potatoes for his family gave up being a doctor for domestic servitude), Bruno’s narrow worldview soon finds its corrective in Shmuel’s hardened knowingness. The scenes between the two boys are delicately played; often they feel like the carefree interactions of any two youngsters, but they never lose their grounding in bitter reality, Shmuel’s missing teeth, dirt smothered face and prisoner garb (the “striped pajamas” of the title) serving as constant reminders of the underlying circumstances of their friendship.

But when Bruno’s away from the camp and we’re reduced to gaping in ironic amazement as his sister lines her wall with Hitler posters or when a young soldier callously remarks on the stench of burning bodies, the film runs into some rather greater difficulties. Then its more or less ludicrous conclusion—though partly in keeping with the film’s fable-like logic—attempts to pack all the gravity of the Holocaust into one hysterical sequence, but this very gravity is undercut by Herman’s decision to call on familiar genre tropes for his exposition. So the lead-in to the final moments plays like a heavily crosscut climax to some cheap thriller (or Birth of a Nation for that matter) while a final trip to the gas chamber is like nothing so much as the payoff in a particularly lurid horror flick. At once too historically removed from its subject and too hysterically committed, Boy in the Striped Pajamas isn’t the first movie to miscalculate in its attempts to bring that most unfilmable of historical events to the screen and if this season’s programming is any indication it certainly won’t be the last.

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Image/Sound

Skin tones lack detail and are a little pallid (but maybe that was the point) on this Boy in the Striped Pajamas DVD, though Asa Butterfield’s sky-blue eyes and writer-director Mark Herman’s incessant, clobber-you-over-the-head-and-drag-you-off-to-the-showers prison-bar imagery are crystal clear. The surround sound is nothing to write home about, but dialogue—that is, all of those English-German accents—come through loudly, clearly, and bewilderingly.

Extras

The audio commentary by Herman and author John Boyne is a veritable snooze fest, littered with patches of silence. The pair seems more interested in watching the film than actually talking about it. One revealing piece of information is divulged, however, when Boyne mentions the inaccuracy of the comandante’s house being located outside the concentration camp, a deliberate move he made in the novel to facilitate the melodrama by keeping the story’s two young boys separated by a barbed-wire fence. Other bonus features include the 30-minute, saccharine-scored featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” and five deleted scenes, most of which-including a scene in which the comandante’s two children discuss what they believe is a “farm” off in the distance-probably could have remained in the film, which is only 90 minutes long.

Overall

The description on the back of the box says it best: From “the studio that brought you the Academy Award-winning Life Is Beautiful” comes another Holocaust movie that you’re sure to love! Only this time there’s no happy ending, or Academy Awards.

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Score: 
 Cast: Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, Amber Beattie, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Richard Johnson, Sheila Hancock, Rupert Friend, David Hayman, Jim Norton, Cara Horgan  Director: Mark Herman  Screenwriter: Mark Herman  Distributor: Buena Vista Home Entertainment  Running Time: 94 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2008  Release Date: March 10, 2009  Buy: Video, Soundtrack, Book

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