It requires no great talent to reduce an audience to tears when your backdrop is a concentration camp. If your principals are potato-headed children, so much the better. We have, thankfully, moved on from the Golden Age of Holocaust porn, when mawkish projects such as Life is Beautiful and Jacob the Liar hijacked historical atrocities in the name of Oscar expectation.
The Boy In Striped Pyjamas, a film that features both concentration camps and potato-headed children, has no such Naz-ploitation instincts. It is, rather, a children’s film based on a children’s book, though try telling that to the three million Irish grown-ups who have turned John Boyne’s book of the same name into a commuter kidult sensation.
The hook, for most of these people, is the nine-year-old narrator, Bruno, whose eyes-of-a-child perspective brings both clarity and naivety to the proceedings. Early in the film, Bruno (Asa Butterfield) and his family move to the country so that his father (David Thewlis), a commander general of a Nazi concentration camp, might commence his grim duties.
His son, of course, is entirely clueless as to the nature of his new home; he imagines that the people in striped pyjamas he sees through his bedroom window are working on some sort of farm. A committed explorer, he soon befriends a Jewish boy called Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) from behind the electric fence, a relationship we are sure, can only end badly.
Elsewhere, standing in for the obligatory Good German, we find Bruno’s mummy (Vera Farmiga) hitting the bottle and his grandmother sulking about Hitler in Berlin. His pre-teen sister, meanwhile, conveys the seductive sway of Nazism by falling for Rupert Friend, a dashing young officer pitched somewhere between Daniel Truhitte from The Sound Of Music and Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List.
Sadly, like these films, The Boy In Striped Pyjamas is far too sanitised to represent the unrepresentable. Its cuddliness is further compounded by budgetary constraints; even allowing for the blind sided narrative focus, a concentration camp ought to look like a concentration camp and not a security minded community centre. Audiences seasoned by repeat viewings of the Shoah are unlikely to be impressed.
One suspects, however, that this palatability will enable the film to find a mainstream audience. This is a Holocaust movie for those who, ordinarily, could not bear to sit through such a thing.
Certainly, as an all-ages picture, there is much to admire here. Once Striped Pyjamas moves into the third act, director Mark Berman (Little Voice, Brassed Off) abandons the teatime telly aesthetic in favour of thrilling cross-cuts and the film comes into its own. Some excellent performances further the cause; Vera Farmiga’s (The Departed) compromised Nazi wife and Rupert Friend’s wounded, sadistic soldier seem to cry out for awards.
Expect old-fashioned queues around the block for this old-fashioned weepie.