Ill-Informed Gadfly

Six million Jews were slaughtered during the Holocaust, and the makers of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” decide to illustrate this abhorrent truth by telling a fanciful story about a wealthy Nazi family. I’m trying to figure out a way to execute this concept that wouldn’t be idiotic. The movie is based on a children’s book by Irish author John Boyne, and perhaps he’s more successful at burrowing into the consciousness of his 8-year-old protagonist. On screen, young Bruno just looks thick, and his adventures are drawn with a crude and fatuous hand. Bruno is the son of a Nazi general who moves his family within spitting distance of the concentration camp he runs. Screenwriter and director Mark Herman strains credulity by suggesting that a devoted Hitler disciple would show no interest in indoctrinating his wife and children, instead trying ineffectually to deceive them about the camp’s purpose. Bruno is unable to comprehend the horrors around him, even after he befriends a Jewish boy on the other side of the barbed wire. Instead, he spouts cute little malapropisms. The message of “The Boy In the Striped Pajamas” seems to be that kids say, and do, the darndest things. The ending, unusually bleak for a movie about children, doesn’t redeem it. Herman inadvertently suggests that Bruno would have been better off if he believed Jews were a scourge on the fatherland. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a bumbling tearjerker that has improbably become a word-of-mouth hit. Even if you swallow its many absurdities, it’s not inspiring or cathartic; it’s just a downer.