Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The

If there’s one thing a holocaust film should resist, it is the temptation to be cute. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas bargains that it can use both sides of that word- affected charm and cleverness in manipulating its audience.
The subject matter is a bit too grim for either (like Robert Benigni's misfire, Life is Beautiful).
The film’s first problem, glaringly obvious from the outset, is that none of the near entirely English cast (playing mostly Germans and Poles) is going to take a remote stab at an accent. The script even resorts to British colloquialisms at times.
I have always been an Anglophile. I tend to love most anything from our cousins across The Pond. I was raised in the cinematic days of halcyon when every Senator, Emperor, soldier and subject of Rome spoke the King’s English exclusively on the screen. My “Sandals and Scandals” period I call it. There was also no blood, no nudity, stilted dialogue and really fake violence. Movies (and I) thankfully matured.
Why not give it the old Ralph Fiennes' college try in Schindler's List. Sure, he sounded like a cross between Arte Johnson and Marvin the Martian from Bugs Bunny (“Give me the Space ‘Mod-you-lay-tore’, Jew!”), but at least it didn’t sound like a Gestapo officer from Brighton for chrissakes.
In more capable directorial hands (and a rewrite) the themes and subject matter here could really sing a tragic note. In the universal lesson of the dehumanization and devaluation of people due to race as a learned, not innate, response. This is realized, although not capably here, through a child’s untainted eyes; before prejudice, hate and the ability to perform unconscionable acts of persecution and violence take hold of one’s psyche. Mindless indoctrination (much like with religion) is the harbinger of things wrongheaded and often monstrous.
The film satisfies these tenets in rote manner only. The caricatures come in the form of the psychological sadist, the camp commandant (David Thewlis), who has dragged his family (wife, daughter, son) from Berlin to a remote concentration camp (assumedly Auschwitz). Here, his soldierly duty transcends any fatherly obligation he feels (another of the film’s missed explorations) and the character remains, simply, a cold psychopath.
His abusive, youthful doppelganger (Rupert Friend) deflects our hatred for the commandant by being his ersatz bludgeon. The sneering blonde Aryan with loose Jewish teeth falling from his blood-soaked knuckles. A cliché that dismisses the true evil of his nature.
The only fresh slant in the film comes from the moral protestation’s of the commandment’s wife (Vera Farmiga) who does not dutifully abide the horrors in which her husband indulges.
The center of the film is in the tragic lost innocence of two boys who form a peculiar friendship. One, a Jew in the camp (Jack Scanlon). The other, the son of the commandant (Asa Butterfield).
But here the story becomes both naïve and overwrought. What could have been a simple, touching look at the lives and thoughts of children caught up in a nightmare they cannot comprehend (see René Clément’s masterful Forbidden Games) devolves into an unlikely tragic convenience.
An ironic “meet-cute” amidst the abominations of Auschwitz.