The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a historical drama film made in 2008, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Irish author John Boyne. I chose to rant about this today simply because it comes second in the list of rants-to-be I made earlier (top of the list is The Dark Knight, though I decided not to discuss that as I believe that it would require me to watch it again so I can talk about it with it fresh in my mind. TBitSP, however, I know enough of to be able to do something decent with immediately).
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a film I hate with a passion. This isn’t because it’s a ‘bad’ film from an acting or a technical standpoint. The mise-en-scène is actually pretty good. Instead, it’s one of those films whose very premise goes beyond the realms of plausibility and into utter stupidity – so much so that the viewer’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief‘ (in the words of the sage-but-shockingly-addictive website TV Tropes) all but collapses. In fact, the plot (and most importantly, the ending) is so ludicrous that it’s simply offensive. It’s offensive to Jews, it’s offensive to Germans and it’s offensive to anyone who knows anything about the Holocaust.
The film follows a nice nuclear family of Germans in the middle of the Second World War. Dad’s daily grind takes place at the SS HQ in Berlin, but he’s just been promoted to be the commandant of a concentration camp in the middle of nowhere. At first, only the parents know about this, telling their teenage daughter Gretel and eight-year-old son Bruno nothing about the horrific work of their old man. The boy starts sneaking out of the house and somehow ends up at the fence of the concentration camp and chatting to a Jewish kid of his own age, Shmuel, through the fence.
Before we go any further, this is already quite unrealistic in terms of plot. I can’t say I know much about how far away the commandants lived from the concentration camps, but the idea that a kid could sneak through the back garden and right up to an unguarded fence and have a natter with one of the inmates is very unlikely at best. I do know, however, that anyone who wasn’t able to work at the camps (like eight-year-old boys) was killed immediately, so in real life, Shmuel wouldn’t even be there. Unfortunately, it only gets worse.
Bruno and Shmuel’s chin-wags continue for a while, with the former increasingly bored living in the countryside and also increasingly concerned about his new mate’s well-being, as well as that of the others wearing the “striped pyjamas” in the camp. A low point in both the mood and the realism half-way through the film sees Shmuel roped into cleaning the German family’s wine glasses, only to get beaten up after lily-livered Bruno lets him eat some of the posh nosh on the table, but when a soldier turns up, claims he was stealing the grub. (Why is the Jewish kid in the house without supervision? Why is he even there in the first place? The kids wouldn’t even be talking in real life! Aaargh!)
Basically, all this continues until the point where, at one of their fence-side chats, Shmuel tells Bruno his dad’s gone missing. There appears to be a convenient kid-sized hole in the fence, so Bruno dons some ‘pyjamas’ and climbs through the hole into the camp to help his mate find his dad. The good news for them is that they find him; the bad news, however, is that it’s gassing time at the camp and Shmuel’s block is next on the list. You can guess what happens next. Cue slow-motion shots of grown men being shepherded like sheep into the infamous ‘shower blocks’, being ordered to take their clothes off with an emotional violin accompaniment… and the realisation on the German family’s faces as they piece together the clues, rush over to the camp, only to be greeted by the smoking chimneys.
It’s disgusting. This experience was felt by millions of people as they were degraded, tortured and killed so inhumanely during the Nazi occupation of much of Europe. Yet the writers had the audacity to trivialise, sentimentalise and sully the memory of the hordes of innocents who died in the concentration camps with this abomination of a plot. The child practically waltzing into the camp, the out-of-the-blue MacGuffin of the father, the way we, the audience, are supposed to be moved by the fate of these two individuals as we see the despair on the parents’ faces… it’s just disgusting.
If you haven’t fully grasped my point yet, I’ll try and put it bluntly. In the Holocaust, six million Jews died. In this film, a German kid, who, in real life, would never have been anywhere near the camp, let alone make friends with an inmate, enter the camp without anyone noticing, and end up in the gas chambers, dies. The film shifts the emphasis well away from the people who actually suffered in the camps, and instead, paints an absurdly-unrealistic picture with a massive hunk of melodrama and sentimentality of someone who would never be in the camps suffering in the most ‘tragic’, Hollywoodian way possible. That is why I hate this film.
As I said before, by many standards, this film is not a bad film. The acting is convincing, the costumes look spot-on, and there’s even a mildly-interesting sub-plot involving Bruno’s teenage sister getting a crush on one of her dad’s dishy Aryan SS henchmen, who also ends up dead at the end of the film, but out on the Eastern Front (I think there’s supposed to be some kind of message there about there being no winners in war or something, but it’s all drowned by the sea of stupidity of the rest of the story).
Instead, it’s the whole premise of the story that annoys me. I’m not the only one either (though this guy dislikes it for different reasons). While there are some Jewish critics who complain about every Holocaust novel or film ever made, to me, Schindler’s List is something of a masterpiece as it takes the true (yes, true) story of how Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jews and marries it with the shocking truth of how millions died in the concentration camps.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, then, fails completely, by not only making up a ridiculous story about a German kid getting into the camp, but concentrating only on two individuals, hence ignoring the terrible reality of the Holocaust for millions of real people. Rant over!
Linguista Ludens 