It's equally possible to read it as a parable about how evil will eat itself, a film reminding us that many, even most, of those behind the Final Solution were loving family men. And in the wide-eyed innocence with which the two children at the centre of the story misinterpret the facts in front of them, the horror is etched deeper, not smoothed over.
At one point Bruno (Butterfield), the son of concentration camp commandant Ralf (Thewlis), has a graze tended to by a prisoner working in the family kitchen who, he discovers, used to be a doctor. "You can't have been much of a doctor," he says, "if you gave it up to peel potatoes." Little wonder that the film's epigraph is John Betjeman's line about childhood being the time "before the dark hour of reason grows".
As the film opens, Bruno is a happy little Berliner whose father is promoted. The family moves "to the countryside", where his new home has a distant view of what he is told is a farm: it's called Auschwitz, and all the "farmers" wear striped suits. He decides to investigate and meets, across the wire, a young boy called Shmuel (Scanlon). As the friendship develops, it will come to mirror the nation's betrayal of principle that made Nazism possible, and it leads to a climax of unspeakable horror.
The adaptation, by director Herman (
Brassed Off, Little Voice
), of John Boyne's 2006 novel is rather linear and literal, eschewing the original ending's ambiguities, particularly in respect of the father's fate. The finished script, too, is somewhat mechanically assembled: in particular the disintegration of Bruno's mother (Farmiga), when she discovers what's happening, is overdone. And there are some irritating implausibilities, mostly to do with how easily the boys' friendship might have flourished: if the film's Auschwitz had any guards at all, they were indulgent or incompetent or both.
But in an odd way, the slightly wooden pace has the effect of concentrating the mind on what's unfolding just beyond the edges of childish comprehension: a couple of subplots to do with dissent and loyalty are particularly effective since so little is spelled out. We, like the children, are left to wonder at the atrocities of which grown-ups are capable.
Peter Calder
Cast:
David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Asa Butterfield, Amber Beattie, Jack Scanlon
Director:
Mark Herman
Running time:
94 mins
Rating:
M (content may disturb)
Screening:
Berkeley, Bridgeway, Hoyts Lido, Rialto, SkyCity
