The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

• Year: 2008
• Released: 26 Nov 2008
• Country: United Kingdom, United States
• Adwords: 7 wins & 7 nominations
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0914798/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/The_Boy_in_the_Striped_Pyjamas
• Metacritics: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-boy-in-the-striped-pajamas
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English
• MPA Rating: PG-13
• Genre: Drama, War
• Runtime: 94 min
• Writer: John Boyne, Mark Herman
• Director: Mark Herman
• Cast: Asa Butterfield, David Thewlis, Rupert Friend
• Keywords: based on novel or book, world war ii, nazi, children in wartime, concentration camp,

	7.7/10
	55/100

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Storyline

It’s sometime during WWII. Naive eight year old Bruno lives a carefree life of privilege in Berlin, he the son of what he only knows as an important “soldier”. He, his parents, and his twelve year old sister Gretel move to a grand house in the country when his father gets promoted to a new soldiering job in the area. Beyond missing playing with his friends and seeing his paternal grandparents back in Berlin, Bruno is forbidden to wander to the back of their vast property to do one of his favorite activities of exploring, especially toward the “farm” he could see from his bedroom window before his parents had that window boarded up. He can see that Pavel, the kitchen servant that came with the house, is wearing striped pajamas underneath his street clothes, striped pajamas like all the other people he could see on the farm. Bruno also notices the rancid smell coming from the farm whenever smoke emanates from its pair of tall smokestacks. Further exacerbating Bruno’s boredom, his father hires them a tutor whose teaching curriculum is solely history in relation to the current German order. While Gretel laps up their instruction in wanting to impress Lt. Kotler, their young “chauffeur” to who she is attracted, Bruno would still much rather read adventure stories, and have gone to school where he may have met new friends. Eventually, Bruno is able to explore at the back of the property without anyone’s knowledge, he making his way to the barbed wire fence of the farm, the fence the barrier between himself and Shmuel, the eight year old boy on the other side he meets and befriends through the wire. Slowly, Bruno’s also somewhat naive mother Elsa, Gretel and Bruno come to some realizations about their collective and individual positions within the current German order, Bruno’s perspective still with the innocence of a child.

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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Movie Reviews

“We’re meant to be enemies. Did you know that”?

This was truly one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine the friendship story having any semblance of historical fact to it, but it makes one think about the randomness of existence and how tenuous it can be to be on the ‘wrong’ side. The character of Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the epitome of childlike innocence, and his view of the world is one of total acceptance to a young mind incapable of inhumanity and horror. The film skillfully contrasts his character with that of sister Gretel (Amber Beattie), somewhat older and already under the influence of Hitler Youth propaganda. The conflicted portrayal of the mother Elsa (Vera Farmiqa) is also set against the subdued brutality of the Commandant father (David Thewliss).

With a title like “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, I really didn’t know what to expect, and even well into the picture I didn’t have any idea how the story would be brought to a conclusion. When it finally became apparent how this was going to end, it was all I could do to steel myself for the unthinkable and the unconscionable.

It’s a constant source of confusion to my mind how this world can contain such disparate elements leading to heroic examples of humanity contrasted against unspeakable acts of horror and depravity. By any measure of good fortune, maybe a movie like this can convince even a single person with hate and prejudice in their heart that it’s a random whim of the universe that any single person is born the way they are.

Bruno And Shmuel

I can’t speak for other people, but for me The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is a film that can be seen once and once only because the impact is so shattering. Not even a stone statue can be not moved by this film, this child’s eye view of the Holocaust.

Bruno is an 8 year old German kid whose father David Thewlis is an officer in the Wehrmacht. They’re living a nice life in the beginning of World War II in metropolitan Berlin. Thewlis gets orders however shipping him to a command in a nice rural area of southern Germany, presumably Bavaria. Like any other kid he’s upset at being dislocated from his friends and his school, but he certainly hasn’t much to say in the matter.

So the family is uprooted to a lovely pastoral area where Dad’s been put in charge of a concentration camp. Not one of the bigger ones like Auschwitz and Dachau, but a small one that his superiors expect Thewlis to run efficiently.

Young Bruno has absolutely no one to play with and he wanders over to the camp. His parents feel he’s way too young to understand about these things and he makes friends with a kid on the other side of the barbed wire, a young Jewish boy named Shmuel who wears those funny striped pyjamas like everyone else in the camp.

Two things struck me about The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. When I did a review of The Diary Of Anne Frank, the biggest impression I got out of the film was the ordinariness of that small group of Jews hidden in that attic. Who could possibly think these people were any kind of threat to civilization simply for being and believing in their faith? We get to see the other side of the looking glass here, a view of this very average German family, besides young Bruno and Thewlis, there’s mother Vera Famiga and daughter Amber Beattie. Famiga is not happy one bit with her domestic situation and it’s slowly dawning on her that the politics and policies of the Third Reich is the root of her concerns. As for Beattie, she’s really buying into the whole Nazi thing, partly because she’s going through puberty and a young and handsome aide to her father played by Rupert Friend is stirring up those first womanly feelings.

But to all intents and purposes this is your average German family, not too much different than the Frank family in that attic, but that this regime of hate has made Thewlis a death merchant.

The second thing that struck me and it’s what gives hope to this crazy world is what passes between Asa Butterfield as Bruno and Jack Scanlon as Shmuel. If all we are as humans are reflections of our parents prejudices there would be absolutely no hope for mankind. But we do grow, we do question, some of us just don’t accept everything that’s fed to us. We don’t see Shmuel’s world of the camp until the very end, the boys mostly have contact with a barbed wire fence between them. But we see Bruno and his sister being now home schooled in Nazi teachings and his innocent contact with that kid on the other side of the fence makes him question what’s going on.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is one of the best films of 2008. You will not forget the performances of Butterfield and Scanlon and the adult cast members. The end will shatter your mind, but the film’s depiction of friendship growing in the worst possible circumstances is also a message of hope.

Manipulative in the extreme

I had high hopes for THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS, a WW2 drama about a German lad who (somewhat unbelievably) ends up befriending a young Jewish boy in a concentration camp. Sadly, I found the whole experience to be artificial and manipulative in the extreme, an exercise in tugging at the viewers’ heartstrings and nothing more.

Despite strong performances from the two child actors, most things about the production feel hollow. You can pretty much guess where it’s going from the outset, and each unbelievable scene is a step closer to that inevitable outcome. There’s a kind of subtle, mawkish sentimentality hanging over the whole production that ended up spoiling the experience for me. I didn’t care for the characters at all, particularly Bruno, who seemed a selfish, spoilt little brat throughout.

It doesn’t help that David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga both give unsatisfying performances that feel staged and self-conscious. But the real problem is that ending, which deliberately goes out of its way to push the viewer where it wants them to go emotionally, while at the same time trivialising an entire part of history.