The Boy in the Striped Pajamas will undoubtedly pull many a heartstring and make many an audience member shed a tear, but, with a premise and execution this hollow and manipulative, I beg you, don't fall for it. Don't give into filmmakers who know that children in peril and Holocaust stories have an inherent emotional power and are prepared to use that power to do whatever it takes to make you cry. Striped Pajamas is not just misguided drama. It's a film that should never have been allowed to be made. The story works in print as a novel, but so many bad decisions were made in the filmmaking process that it completely deflates the narrative of its power. This kind of awful filmmaking will probably be excused thanks to the emotional strength of the subject matter, but The Boy in the Striped Pajamas takes a potentially powerful story and turns into manipulative dreck of the highest order. It's not just bad, it's offensive.

Striped Pajamas rubbed me the wrong way from minute one. The film is about Germans in World War II, and - get this - it's not only in English but with British accents. With fantastic films about the Holocaust like Downfall and Fateless being filmed in the language that the characters would have spoken, we've reached a point where David Thewliss playing a German soldier with a British accent speaking in English is simply unacceptable. You might think I'm nitpicking, but one of my biggest problems with Striped Pajamas is the fact that it's supposed to be a heartbreaking tale about a German Nazi family's experience during the Holocaust. The idea that some Nazis has a real rough time mere yards from a concentration camp is hard enough for me to swallow dramatically, but it's made intensely more so when the family in question isn't even German, but British, as if we can only relate to people who look like us and speak our language. It's the same stomach-churning xenophobia that aggravates me about the dozens of movies about Africa told almost entirely through the eyes of the pretty white people who visit there or try to save its people. It's disingenuous and disgusting.

One of the few saving graces of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is the caliber of the cast, including two believable children in the primary roles of Bruno (Asa Butterfield) and Shmuel (Jack Scanlon). Bruno's father is a Nazi leader (David Thewliss) who lives in a house not far from a concentration camp during World War II. Bruno's mother (Vera Farmiga) knows what her husband does but is in a small state of denial about the smoke coming from the chimneys on the horizon or how her daughter's teacher is warping the poor girl's mind with propaganda about the evil Jew. Bruno is not allowed to leave the spacious estate of his family, but he longs for other kids to play with. One day, when the back door is left open, he makes his way to a fence with a bald, emaciated boy his age on the other side. They form a friendship that is bound to end in unbelievable tragedy.

Butterfield and Farmiga are believable (once I got over my "why are they speaking English" issue), but the script for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is nothing but pure manipulation. What's the point here? That some Nazi families were torn apart and faced unspeakable pain of their own as they killed millions of Jews? That's a tough sell and the team here just doesn’t close the deal. Honestly, Striped Pajamas made me appreciate how delicately the humanization of people as inhuman as the Nazis was handled in Downfall. That was drama. This is exploitation. That was realistic. This is soap opera. That was good. This is not.

Rating: ONE BONE

Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: November 7th, 2008

Rating: PG-13

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Vera Farmiga, David Thewliss, and Jack Scanlon

Director: Mark Herman

Writer: Mark Herman

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