The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, based on the eponymous novel by John Boyne, recounts the tragedy of the Holocaust as filtered through the innocent screen of childhood naiveté. The plot centers on an eight-year-old German boy, Bruno (newcomer Asa Butterfield), whose father (David Thewlis) is put in charge of a Nazi death camp. Lonely for company, Bruno explores the forest behind their home until he discovers an electric fence and another young boy, Shmuel, sitting within its confiProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0
s. The resulting friendship paves the path to Bruno’s gradual realization of the atrocities that humanity can inflict upon its own.
Thematically, the film feels like an amalgam of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful and Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland. While it may initially appear simplistic to portray the Holocaust through the eyes of a young German boy, the resulting effect is extraordinarily profound. Bruno becomes a metaphor for all of those who remained ignorant of the genocide inflicted by the Nazi regime, unable or unwilling to fully grasp the scope of its horrors until it was too late. The film, however, allows the gravity of history to stand alone, without overbearing direction or camerawork. Instead, it is cinematographically beautiful, the saturated colors of Bruno’s home thoughtfully juxtaposed against the harsh colorlessness of Auschwitz. Ultimately, this is one of those rare instances where masterful storytelling further illuminates one of the darkest corners of modern history.
