ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

CINEMA has provided us with a powerful collection of films about the Holocaust, from the Oscar-winning Schindler’s List to the epic Shoah. There is always room for another drama that provides a personal insight into man’s inhumanity to man.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is based on the bestseller by John Boyne and sees familiar events through the eyes of Bruno (Asa Butterfield), an eight year-old boy whose father becomes a Kommandant at Auschwitz.

The film is produced by a British company and in attempting to reach as wide an audience as possible, they have made the film in English. It is a fatal flaw that keeps the audience at arm’s length.

The casting of Sheila Hancock, Richard Johnson and David Thewlis as key members of Bruno’s family lend the film the air of a country mansion period piece or a Miss Marple mystery. Scottish audiences will find the problem highlighted by the presence of David Hayman as a Polish concentration camp prisoner. His acting is beautiful but he too is obliged to adopt a clipped English voice.

Bruno has an innocence that could be construed as symptomatic of a wider nation who claimed to know nothing of the mass killings taking place in their name. When the family move to rural Poland, it is a promotion for his father.

Bruno is told the local people in their striped uniforms are merely farmers and field hands. He starts to explore and soon befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a young Jewish boy held in a compound surrounded by an electrified barbed wire fence.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas doesn’t flinch from the nightmare ending of the book, but it does feel stilted and stodgy. It is the kind of worthy production that will seem entirely at home on the BBC but doesn’t offer persuasive reasons to catch it at the cinema.

Nationwide release

Director: Mark Herman
Cast: David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, Sheila Hancock, David Hayman.
Screenwriter: Mark Herman based on the novel by John Boyne
Certificate: 12A
Running time: 94mins
Country: UK
Year: 2008