Directed by: Mark Herman
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, Vera Farmiga, David Thewlis
Watching Schindler's List again recently, I can't fathom how Jews who were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps felt about being rounded up, shipped to camps like cattle, stripped of all dignity, and in some cases, eventually gassed or murdered. I can't even venture an inkling about the hopelessness and dread they felt each day as they were treated to such misery. I can't imagine how the Nazi guards went about their daily business as if they weren't dealing with human beings. How could they stand it? How were they able to do their duty and reconcile their acts with their consciences at the end of the day? This went on all over Europe for nearly six years. How much hatred could people have towards others to carry out such acts? Could Hitler's rantings about German superiority be so persuasive that he turned these people into monsters? It's so scary to think about.
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is a film about a concentration camp commandant whose eight-year old son befriends a boy in a striped suit who is imprisoned behind barbed wire. The commandant (Thewlis) recently received a promotion to commandant and transferred out to the country from affluent Berlin. I can't imagine how being made the head of a death camp could be considered something positive, but to the Nazi hierarchy it was. How could the commandant treat his family with such love and compassion, yet show none toward the people in the camp behind his home? How could all of this not get to him sooner or later?
I know I'm asking a bunch of questions to which there are no answers. Examining Nazism is a thankless enterprise in film because it requires trying to make sense of the senseless. In The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, there is no heroic Oskar Schindler around to buy the prisoners away from certain death. There is no hope for the young Jewish boy who befriends Bruno, the son of the commandant. The film begins in 1940, which means there are roughly five more years of suffering for those imprisoned in the camp, if they survive that long.
Certainly the commandant appears level-headed, organized, and competent, which makes it all the more frightening that he is a death camp commandant. What if the Nazis put all of their organizational skills and intelligence into doing something good? It's likely cancer would be eradicated from the planet. Instead, they chose to follow the whims of evil incarnate.
It's obvious what I think about Nazis, but what did I think of the movie? It's difficult to review this film without describing the mindset that made the plot and its conclusion possible. The boys are roughly the same age. Neither understands too much about why one is imprisoned while the other is free. They relate to each other as boys can. They become friends and just want to play together. The son even admires his father, obviously not knowing what he does for a living. The boy's mother (Farmiga) tells him they moved to a farm and that the people in the striped suits were farmers. There doesn't seem to be a lot of tractors around or much farm work being done.
The film itself is sad, heartbreaking, and powerful. A happy ending isn't likely or even possible in these surroundings. The two becoming friends in the open and accepted by the commandant would be an unrealistic fairy tale. The viewer's B.S. meter would fly off the charts. I won't give away the ending, except to say that it may be the tipping point for the commandant to learn that he is part of an evil machine that cost him so much more than he ever anticipated. The final shot is thought-provoking as well. We see robes and clothes hanging that belonged to people who were just alive a minute ago but are now gone. How could this have happened? The commandant and his family may or may not discover the answers, but no matter what, it's too late for all of them.
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