Should never have been made: Review of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

I, together with the men in my book group,  read John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in February 2006. I, and most of the group, praised the book’s unconventional, freshly revealing look at the Holocaust. The book’s narrative frame is quite simple: an eight-year-old German boy moves with his father, a soldier the son is proud of, to an imposing house in the country, by a fenced-off area the boy is forbidden to go near. Deftly, the author reveals soon enough what Bruno cannot comprehend: his father is commandant of a Nazi death camp. Bruno strikes up a friendship with a boy, dressed oddly in pyjamas, on the other side of the fence. At the end they unite on one side of the fence. Tragedy occurs. Boyne’s writing, stripped back, almost that of a young boy, drags us inexorably into the heart of the beast.

The film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was released last month in Australia, some eight months after its UK debut. Naturally, I went with high expectations, tempered of course by the memory of many books badly handled in the past, but what I hadn’t realized was something that was obvious from the very beginning: the book’s narrative device – an unaware child versus the knowing reader – cannot be duplicated on screen. In the very first scene, we know we’re in Nazi Germany and that Bruno’s dad is a member of the SS. The revelations of the book are background eye candy in the film. And, I have to report, that structural issue ruins the movie experience. Indeed, the direction by Mark Herman (the only other film I’ve seen of his is the excellent Brassed Off), faithful as it is to the novel, feels like viewer manipulation from the outset. The English language novel, written by an English author, felt natural; the English actors, making no attempt to muster fake German accents, strike one as discordant, though a few of the performances (Asa Butterfield as Bruno, Vera Farmiga as his mother) are exemplary. The book’s rising tension is echoed in the movie as tedious foreshadowing. The daunting climax, so moving in the book, is probably the film’s most effective scene (my heart pounded), but immediately strikes one as repugnant. Clearly the moviemakers couldn’t duplicate the book’s effective minor coda, so the film ends in flat misery. I left the cinema soul-soiled.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas should not have been made. As a movie, it cannot add to the neverending reflection on the Holocaust. Whilst I know there are opposite views – a friend who admits knowing little about World War II genocide was deeply moved – anyone seeking more than a ‘lest we forget’ reminder stands to leave the cinema with my deep sensation of regret.