DVD Review: Manipulative ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ Feels False

DVD Rating: 1.5/5.0

CHICAGO – The plot of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” new to DVD and based on a best-selling novel by John Boyne, may have worked on the page but a number of awful decisions on the way to the screen have taken a story with inherent emotional strength and turned it into misguided, manipulative drama.

People who rent or buy “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” will probably cry, but does that make it a good film? Of course not. Filmmakers who are willing to use children in peril stories just to make you shed a tear aren’t doing anything put pulling at your heartstrings. To what end? If it doesn’t feel real, it’s just manipulation.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was released on DVD on March 10th, 2009.
Photo credit: Miramax Home Video

“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” feels misguided from minute one. The film is about Nazis during World War II, but it’s done with British accents. With so many great recent films about the Holocaust in the language they should be in (“Downfall,” “Fateless”), we’ve reached a point where David Thewliss playing a German soldier with a British accent feels weird.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was released on DVD on March 10th, 2009. Photo credit: Miramax Home Video

This could easily be seen as nitpicking but it plays into some of my negative feelings about the movie overall. “Striped Pajamas” is a supposedly heartbreaking tale about the experience of a German Nazi family during the Holocaust. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the reason they speak with British accents is to make them more relatable to English-speaking audiences, as if the only people we can mourn must look like us and speak our language. It’s disingenuous.

The title of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” refers to a child named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) in a concentration camp. The lead of the film is not Shmuel. He’s just the device. The lead is Bruno (Asa Butterfield), whose father is a Nazi officer (David Thewliss [5]). They move to a house not far from Shmuel’s concentration camp during WWII.

Bruno’s mother (Vera Farmiga [12]) knows what her husband does but doesn’t know all the details and lives in a state of denial regarding the smoke coming from the chimneys on the horizon and how her daughter’s teacher is clearly promoting the final solution to the next generation. Bruno is not supposed to leave his estate, but he sneaks out and finds another kid to play with that he believes lives on a “farm”. It will, of course, end in tragedy.

I like Farmiga (“The Departed [14],” “Nothing But the Truth [15]”) immensely and Butterfield strikes some believable notes in the lead role, but the script is the problem with “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”. What’s the point here? That some Nazi families learned some hard lessons during WWII? That’s a tough sell dramatically and the team here just doesn’t close the deal. It feels like exploitation, not realism.

“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is presented in widescreen with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio that has been enhanced for 16x9 televisions and accompanied by a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound track. Bonus features include deleted scenes with optional commentary by writer/director Mark Herman and author John Boyne, “Friendship Beyond the Fence,” and a feature commentary by writer/director Mark Herman and author John Boyne.

[16]	By BRIAN TALLERICO [17] Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com [16]