DADDY’S got this cool death’s head insignia on his uniform. He’s taking us to live in a country house. From my window, I can see the local farmers who live behind a barbed-wire fence and are burning something that smells yucky.
So goes “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” a L’il Holocaust film that began as a children’s book and probably should have ended there. The bulk of the movie consists of scene after scene coyly setting up the same ironic juxtaposition, in the exact same way, about innocence vs. Nazism.
The story is told from the point of view of an 8-year-old boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), whose father (David Thewlis) is an SS officer and whose mother (Vera Farmiga) is vaguely unsettled by the thought of living near a “work camp,” i.e. death camp.
Bruno is a lonely boy who is forced to play checkers by himself while his 12-year-old sister flirts with the local lieutenant. So he wanders through the countryside until he meets a boy his own age who sits in his “striped pajamas” behind an electrified fence. “Not fair, me being stuck here on my own while you’re over there, playing with friends all day,” says Bruno.
And: “What do you burn in those chimneys? Is it just hay and stuff?”
And, “Perhaps you can come and have supper with us?”
Nazi kids – they say the darnedest things. The point is made. Late in the movie – far too late for such preciousness – the Jewish kid, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), says, “This is fun,” as the two boys play checkers.
For a brief moment, after Bruno and his sister have been tutored from the Big Book of Jew Hating, the movie threatens to become interesting. How does a young innocent’s mind fill with poison? The older sister starts putting up Hitler posters, a decorating idea that seems to startle the mother. But why the wife of an SS officer would be taken aback by Master Race porn is as unclear as how such a mother would fail to notice that her kid was running away from home every day to play with an imprisoned Jew.
In the final act, this BBC production works up a severely contrived ending that might strike even the most shameless Hollywood producer as a bit much. When it comes to the Holocaust, contrivance is neither welcome nor necessary.
THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS
Shoah for small fry.
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated PG-13 (disturbing Holocaust images). At the Cinemas 1, 2, 3, Third Avenue and 60th Street.