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Page to Screen by Elizabeth Bird While many children's books have sought to teach young readers about Hitler's greatest atrocity, few have been quite as divisive as John Boyne's 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This novel has caused some readers to sing its praises to the heavens while others desire nothing more than to rake out their own eyeballs after a chapter or two. The tale involves a preternaturally naive child who inadvertently discovers a concentration camp in his backyard and a new friend on the other side of the fence. Some find the book to be a heartwarming tale of innocence in the midst of horror, while others, like myself, have found it to be disingenuous, oppressively repetitive, infuriating, and unbelievable. Mark Herman serves as both director and screenwriter to this Miramax film and in doing so attempts to replace the novel’s more naively twee elements with an honest-to-goodness story arc. That it isn’t effective is due less to Herman's clear labor of love than to the material he has to work with. Asa Butterfield plays Bruno, the now eight-year-old (down from nine in the book) son of a prominent Nazi officer. Given that the boy's bright blue eyes call to mind a pint-sized Bing Crosby, cinematographer Benoit Delhomme does his darnedest to display those guileless peepers in every conceivable light. Upon exploring the backyard of his new home, Bruno comes across the small and fragile Shmuel, and the two strike up an unlikely and improbable friendship. That it will all end tragically, and violently, is inevitable. Herman has sought meticulously to remove some of the novel's affectations and factual inaccuracies. Gone is Bruno’s pronunciation of Auschwitz as “Out-with.” Gone are the repetitive mentions of his "three best friends for life" back in Berlin and his winsome address of the Fuhrer as "the Fury" (Hitler himself having been entirely expunged from the movie, appearing only on a poster in the room of Bruno's sister). Added to the film are evocations of the tell-tale odors of the concentration camp, whereas in the book they remained unmentioned and unacknowledged. Shmuel's fence has been electrified (though it is still bafflingly unguarded), and now Bruno must dig under it to get across to Shmuel's side. These are little details, but they suggest that Herman worked hard to translate the novel to the big screen. Yet new problems have emerged. Though Auschwitz is never mispronounced, it is never pronounced, either. Now we are at an anonymous concentration camp…somewhere. Bruno retains his unconvincing lack of knowledge concerning Jews, Hitler, and anything at all to do with the war (despite his love of soldiers), which strains at the viewer's belief from the start. And his mother has joined him in wide-eyed surprise, finding herself shocked, shocked, when her daughter shows an affinity for the Hitler Youth lifestyle. Bruno's mother doesn't even have the affair with a handsome young officer implied in the book; all mentions of this and her drinking are removed so that she may become yet another innocent victim at the story's close. On top of this come basic improbabilities like Bruno hugging his father in front of important officers and calling him Dad, and the casual attitude of the maid Maria toward her employers. What Herman has tried to do here is give Bruno a personal arc, something he lacked entirely in the novel. While author Boyne deliberately kept his hero from ever learning and growing (in fact, the novel called itself “A Fable”), Herman allows Bruno a chance to question the world around him and, more specifically, his father. Unfortunately, actor Asa Butterfield is just not up to the challenge, for while his spoken delivery is fine, his facial expressions never change. It is a long-standing American cinematic tradition to give bad guys and Serious Subjects British accents in our films, and certainly the aura conveyed by the Queen's English is only enhanced by the thoroughly British John Betjeman quote that opens the movie. Indeed, the first half of Pajamas feels like a kind of WWII version of The Secret Garden, complete with cheeky maid, glorious forbidden greenery, and a secret friend. Only now, instead of finding an English robin or rosebush, Bruno discovers a crematorium. The effect is not the same. And then there is the ending. Where Boyne's novel turns Bruno's unfortunate end into an oddly peaceful final rest, Herman ratchets up the horror, making the final scenes into a doomed race against time. Herman wants it both ways: he wants to drill home the horror of the Holocaust and to create a film suitable for children. He wants to stay authentic to the worst aspects of WWII but couch it in a sweet allegory of questionable facts. The debate on when it is appropriate to teach children about the Holocaust will continue, but I suspect that most adults will find the bleak and violent end to this film too shocking for kids younger than ten or eleven. There is innocence, and then there is idiocy. Boyne's book failed to distinguish between the two. Herman's film does not attempt to hide behind the term fable, but its continued attempt to remain allegorical does little better. Too violent to be a children's film, too simplistic for adults, the movie wants to be Life Is Beautiful and ends up pleasing no one.
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