The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Like in a Greek tragedy, just about all the violence in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas takes place off screen. That however doesn't diminish in any way its power to shock and trouble you. What it does, though, is let the real issue the film deals with be truly front and center. What this movie is about is not the ability of one decent man to shape and save the lives of many of his fellow humans (Schindler's List) nor about the attempts of one decent individual to safeguard a child's innocence (Life is Beautiful). Rather this is about losing one's innocence in a criminally totalitarian regime, in all the forms this loss can take, from the slow and painful realization of the horror going on under one's very nose, to the troubled attempts to reconcile one's experience with the way public discourse frames that experience (particularly insidious when one's father is representative of that public discourse); from the informed unwillingness or inability to speak out to the uninformed acceptance and embrace of the brainwashing exercised by the public discourse and the educational systems. Bruno's attempts to put together the puzzle of reality are followed admirably, and Asa Butterfield's performance is as troublingly sad as Jack Scanton's (Shmuel) is haunting. Beyond the tragedy unfolding on screen, this film has a truly much darker message, or two, up its sleeve: first, that because a totalitarian system has this way of imbricating all its privileged members in its crimes, (where "privileged" means those it doesn't choose to kill or otherwise harm), there is an overarching complicity that is truly damaging of human nature and human decency. Second, as a result of the rather strange choice of making this a film in English, what it loses in authenticity (though, in the end not much, because of extremely good performances) it gains in universality: it's always suspectingly easy to think only others capable of perpetrating criminal acts. It's always difficult if not impossible to think that our own parents and relatives and friends and acquaintances may in fact be guilty of anything like that. Well, maybe not of something quite like what the movie shows happening, but of a similar disregard for our fellow humans, that can, in extremis, lead to similarly criminal acts. And, fortunately for our sanity and for the human race, most of us never have to actually face such a situation where our bearings become completely useless. The possibility though is always there, and it is against it that we have to be always most careful, it is against the complicit theorization that evil is always "the other" that this movie also seems to warn.