Monday, Nov. 24, 2008

'Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' produces somber audience

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'm getting tired of World War II and/or Holocaust movies.

OK, it definitely makes me a bad person. Good -- now I don't have to worry about not shoving the elderly anymore or paying attention when someone tries to explain what our laws are. And if my moral turpitude means I only have to watch two or three WWII movies a year instead of 10,000 , then I'll wake up in hell with a smile until I realize I was just woken up by a clown with a flamethrower.

For me, it's simple exhaustion. You can only see so many shots of piled-up bodies and bombed-out cities before you think "Ah, right. Greatest crime in human history. Bummer." After a while, all that suffering and sacrifice can start to feel manipulative. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas takes this a step further with a story of children in the Holocaust, a recipe for big fat forced tears if ever there were one.

When Asa Butterfield's Nazi Army father David Thewlis is promoted, it means a move to an isolated house in the country. While the rest of the family settles in, Butterfield, lacking any friends, takes to exploring the woods and fields.

And discovers a concentration camp, where he strikes up a friendship with an imprisoned boy. Mother Vera Farmiga lets him believe the camp is a farm, but she, too, has been lied to, thinking it's a work camp -- and when she discovers the mass deaths there, her relationship with Thewlis starts to fall apart.

For most of its run, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is that kind of quietly competent literary movie that finds its drama in small moral choices that add up to big internal dilemmas. The problem with internal dilemmas, of course, is that unless they involve a surgically implanted bomb, they're rarely what you'd term enthralling.

It isn't that every movie needs 80-foot robots with bazookas for fingers (though God, does it help), it's that moral dramas, like the punishing roundhouse kick that tears the bad guy's cryogenically frozen head off, take a long time to wind up. And if they miss, they fall hard.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas keeps itself in position to succeed by letting the characters and their beliefs speak for themselves. Rather than trying to make its Nazi family overly sympathetic, they're all implicated by degrees, from Thewlis' true believer to Farmiga, who may eventually turn on him when she learns the true nature of the camps, but has no qualms about keeping slave laborers around the house before then. Meanwhile, the kids struggle to deal with propaganda from their parents and the military -- seeing how they become indoctrinated, it becomes harder to condemn them.

Likewise, there's little in the way of preaching, which is the true bane of the WWII picture. Writer/director Mark Herman, working from author John Boyne's novel, understands you don't need to club viewers over the head for them to understand the significance of what they're seeing: Oh wait, so you're saying genocide is wrong? And the Nazis, I always thought they got a bad rap until your two-hour cinematic lecture set me straight. Finally! Some respect for those long-forgotten heroes, the Allied soldiers!

While it lacks the blundering, clumsy moralizing that cripples so many movies like it, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas isn't especially insightful or moving, either. The dialogue and character development are natural enough, but after a while you may start to wonder where all this is heading.

The answer is a real dazer of an ending, one both logical and shocking, played up just enough to capture its power without veering into melodrama. Everything before that gets elevated; people walk out in thoughtful silence.

We've all been exposed to so much about World War II that, by now, new movies about it aren't strictly necessary. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas shows they can still have something big to say.

Grade: B+