The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

With a few days left remaining in 2008, I wanted to get a few more movies under my belt, especially ones that had been out for a while. I wanted to start the year with a slate of recent releases instead of ones that had been hanging around in the theater for a month. I had made so much progress, and I was almost there.

Sunday was miraculously nice---over sixty degrees and sunny in Massachusetts. I just didn't have the gumption to spend any of it in a blackened indoor auditorium. Monday saw me with grand plans to see a pair of movies, but in the end, I decided to take it easy and limit myself to one.

It was to be another trip up to the tiny town of Wilton, New Hampshire, to their funky Town Cinema in the old Town Hall where I had seen The Secret Life of Bees at the beginning of the month.

The trip wasn't very far---less than thirty miles driving, but the road across the state line felt dark and spooky when I drove it last time, and that was before winter really set in. As I set out this time, I remembered that last time, coming home in the dark, I had hit a large animal in the dark, probably a raccoon or a fox, and later fishtailed a little on the ice that formed on a bridge after the huge rain that night. No wonder I had been less than enthusiastic.

To make it easier, I left extra early andthus had over half hour to kill when I reached Wilton. I grabbed a cheeseburger in a Greek diner that was open on Main Street. When I went inside the Town Hall, a little before showtime I was stunned to the see place was packed, both for the big auditorium where they were showing Marley and Me, as well as the smaller room, familiar from last time, that was showing the movie I came to see, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It seemed like everyone in town was there on a Monday night.

Almost every seat was taken, and the crowd was much younger than when I saw The Secret Life of Bees. I was scrunched by a window surrounded by teenagers, including the high schooler next to me who checked his text messages at least a dozen times during the show.

One of the quirks about the Town Cinema, at least in the small auditorium, is that the rows of fold-down seats are not bolted to the floor. Whenever I changed position, it warped the entire row near me. It wasn't uncomfortable, just quirky, like I said.

The movie---well, I guess if it's December, it must be Holocaust season, because there are three movies about it in theaters right now. This would be the first one of the three to be crossed off my list. I wonder which one will be the best.

I wasn't really looking forward to this film, not because it was a Holocaust movie, but because it was about children. There is always a danger of making this kind of movie just too damn precious. That was definitely the biggest weakness of Australia in my opinion: even though I enjoyed the movie, I got somewhat tired of the kiddie plot after a while. Children a simply less interesting inherently than adults as main characters, and if there is too much sentimentality surrounding the story line, it just begins to stink.

But Boy in the Striped Pajamas turned out to be exactly the right kind of movie for a child protagonist, because it used him to tell a story that was original concept, which was how he himself naively interpreted the war and the concentration camps. In other words, the story needed to be told from the child's perspective. We as the audience know more than the protagonist, not only because we can see the future, but because we know what is really going on at the nearby "farm" where the people wearing "pajamas" live and work.

The boy's father is the SS Commandant of the camp, played by David Thewlis of the Harry Potter series. It was great casting. Unlike the case in Valkyrie, he is the perfect Nazi mix of loving family man mixed with the cold psychopathy of the men who signed orders for mass executions. I couldn't help but be reminded of these photos of the laughing guards at Auschwitz that surfaced last year.

One of the criticisms I heard about Valkyrie that I was thought was entirely unwarranted was that Tom Cruise and the other actors didn't speak in a German accent. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having actors speak in our vernacular without accents, so long as it is historical to some degree (or anachronistic on purpose). It is a perfectly legitimate directorial decision, one with long tradition in Hollywood going back to World War II itself. In the case of Boy, since this was a BBC production, that actors were all British and we got to experience the casual intimacy of mass cultural psychopathy through the disturbing accents of the English countryside. I thought it worked brilliantly.

The story revolves around the friendship that springs up between the German boy and Jewish boy of similar age who is inside the camp. They meet regularly at the barbed wire to talk and play, and through the meetings, the German boy becomes aware of what is actually going on.

From a narrative point-of-view, the critical story question becomes what will happen to the two boys. The possibilities are obviously that both will live, one will live while the other dies, or that both will die. I won't reveal which path the story takes, because the suspense of it was definitely part of the fun of watching the movie (especially given that we were automatically relieved of the character's "inner" suspense over the discover of the nature of the camps).

Of course the fate of the German child protagonist will depend of the critical decisions he makes as a character, ones that spring from both his naive nature and from his sincere and innocent desire to be friends with the Jewish boy. But since he is a child, in classical terms his fate must also rest with decisions made by his parents, especially by his father. The actions of one generation must affect the others. The success of this type of story depends to a large degree on the carefulness of this cross-generational stitching.

The best kind of connection is one that feels barely noticeable to the audience while it is happening. In this case the relationship between the father and one of his younger lieutenants (a form of a surrogate son) provides the parallel storyline in which the critical character flaw of the father arises, revealing his disrespect from the true nature of the family relationship, and his entire chilling lack of compassion. From the viewpoint of classical tragedy, one can argue that this is exactly the seed of character flaw that propels the movie to its final conclusion.

For the most part, the movie wound up avoiding the sentimental traps it could have fallen into. I found it to be utterly brilliant.

As for me, I managed to make it back home this time without hitting any animals, or sliding on the ice. But along the same stretch of road, there was another weird thing that happened: right after I turned off of Route 101A to head towards Massachusetts, I looked up and saw a meteorite streak across the sky. Except it was no ordinary meteorite. The tail was thick and brilliant, and the fireball itself glowed in a bright blue as it burned up. It looked like a comet falling to earth. I've never seen anything like it.