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'Striped Pajamas': Friends in hard places

The Rocky

Published November 6, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Friends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon, left) and Bruno (Asa Butterfield) bond through barbed wire.

Photo by David Lukacs / Miramax Film Corp.

Friends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon, left) and Bruno (Asa Butterfield) bond through barbed wire.

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It's comforting to think that childhood has the power to sanitize things, that the innocence of youth makes our darkest fears somehow more palatable.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas quickly disabuses us of that notion. Based on Irish writer John Boyne's award-winning children's book, it tells the story of Bruno (Asa Butterfield), the 8-year-old son of a Nazi officer, who finds himself bereft of friends when the family moves to a new home.

That home isn't in bustling Berlin, where Bruno has plenty of playmates, but in a rural part of the country. From his bedroom window, Bruno sees what looks like a farm in the distance. His mother, Elsa (Vera Farmiga), tells him he can't go near the farm. His father (David Thewlis) doesn't say much of anything.

A bored Bruno defies parental authority and wanders through the woods behind the house toward the "farm." Of course, it turns out to be a concentration camp, through whose fence Bruno befriends 8- year-old Shmuel (Jack Scanlon). The haggard-looking child wears the customary camp garb (hence the striped pajamas). Shmuel knows what goes on in the camp; Bruno doesn't. Poor Bruno wants a friend so desperately that he concocts a way to get beyond the barbed wire. We know what's coming.

Long before the film's tragic ending (what, you thought this was Schindler's List Redux?) we watch as things fall apart within Bruno's household. His grandparents are split in their devotion to the Nazis. Grandpa is a believer, while Grandma criticizes the regime at every turn.

Thewlis' camp commandant com- partmentalizes his parents' views; he has a job to do for the Fatherland, and he does it well. Bruno's mother, however, is devastated to learn that her new home is near a killing field. Apparently, her husband never told her the truth about his new assignment. (It's one of the few scenes here that ring false.)

And Bruno's sister (Amber Beattie) is a teen seduced by the romance of the war. It doesn't hurt that she has eyes for a handsome Nazi officer (Rupert Friend). Before long, she's plastered her room with Nazi propaganda.

Director Mark Herman doesn't dwell on the horrors of the concentration camp, which gives The Boy in the Striped Pajamas an extra urgency. We see it as Bruno does, first as an oddity in the distance. Once up close, we see only one small area where Shmuel and other manual laborers work.

That's not to say Herman eschews darkness here. At one point, Shmuel is sent to the commandant's house to do work. When a young officer begins to assault the boy, Bruno denies his friendship with the inmate. He's subsequently wracked with guilt without fully understanding why.

Herman also draws haunting performances from his cast. Thewlis is both distant and clueless to the disintegration of his family. Farmiga's Elsa has the film's most heartfelt moment, when a Jewish prisoner tends to a wound on her son's leg, and she thanks him for his kindness. And both Butterfield and Scanlon capture the complexities of youth: wistful, poetic, stoic and sad.

Like the events it portrays, this film doesn't have a happy ending. How could it and retain its power? You know your heart will break before the story runs its course. You just don't expect the crack to be so deep or so powerful.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

The friendship between the son of a Nazi officer and a concentration-camp inmate.

* Grade: B+

* Rated: PG-13

* Running time: 93 minutes

pearsonm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2592

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