The MoFo Movie Club Discussion: The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

His son was born premature and hasn't left the hospital yet. I think he's been doing well, but I agree that I hope he turns out bright and healthy.

My brother had twin daughters born two months premature two years ago, and they stayed in for about three weeks. They're happy, healthy two-year-olds now, but it is the terrible twos (times two) after all.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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Wow, even when everything goes okay, premies are so scary because they look so tiny and vulnerable and naturally parents worry about them. The good thing is that they have such a great success rate with premature babies. 47 years ago when I was at Irwin Army Hospital in Manhattan, Kan., there seemed to always be a premie or 2 each month and they always did well.

My two sons were Caesarian deliveries because their mom was so small plus other complications. With our first son, she went into labor the morning she was scheduled for operation, but with our second son they had to guesstimate and took him a few days short of full-term. The day we took him home he went into convulsions and we had to race to the emergency room. They put him back in the hospital for another week and watched and tested but never did figure out what had caused it--maybe his blood-sugar was too high or too low, but they were never certain. It never happened again and he's doing fine today at age 37. Doctor said at the time that there are things that happen even in the last days of normal term pregnancy that a baby born even a few days before the due date may require extra adjustment. That can be scary to parents--sure scared hell out of me, but the good news is that doctors can do so much now and the prognosis almost always is fine.

Neither did I. His performance never felt natural at all. You could probably guess exactly what the director said to him before every scene.

Everything in this movie was telegraphed (loudly) and although a lot of interesting issues were touched on, not enough time was given to a single one of them. Like Tacitus, I was completely annoyed with the sudden emergence of little nazi Gretel. Apparently one history lesson and a crush on an older man was enough for a complete personality transformation.

The main thing I feel about this movie is it is completely forgettable. I give it a D

You make a good point about not enough time being devoted to aspects of the film and I imagine that problems of what to include or leave out face everyone making a film from a novel. The director, of course, is at the mercy of the screenwriter who adapted the book.

In the case of The Boy in the Striped pyjamas, the director was also the screenwriter (and producer), so no excuses there.

I've found Mark Hermon pretty solid in the past - Brassed Off and Little Voice in particular - but a gleek (it's an Ulster Scots word ) at his IMDB CV shows that he's also responsible for Blame it on the Bellboy...

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas reeks of 'pet project' to me, but I'm gonna resolve to watch it again in preparation for this thread's second wind.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Although it's well established by now that I haven't seen the movie, I have two observations based on what others in this forum have written about the film.

One: Some have commented unfavorably about the scene where the some of the subjects are revealed to be Nazis. There's a similar revelation in Cabaret that likely was handled much better: The beer garden scene in which there is a tight close-up on a handsome adolescent's face as he begins to sing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." As other boys and girls join in, we see tight shots of their faces. As the song swells with more voices, the camera cuts back to the original singer and pulls back enough for us to see him don his Hitler Youth cap. Then the camera pulls back to show us all of these young people in their uniforms with Nazi armbands as the adults also rise to their feet and begin singing. In Cabaret, it's a great scene revealing the increased popularity of the Nazi Party from its early days as street thugs.

Two: There have been references to a German boy being gassed. In real life, there were hundreds of thousands of German boys and girls, men and women who died in the Nazi death camps. Many of them also happened to be Jews. Others were Gypsies, homosexuals, deformed, mentally deficient, communist, anti-Nazi, or otherwise different. The public too often thinks in terms of Germans vs. Jews, but Jew is a religious designation: Jews were also citizens of Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, the US. Germany had the biggest and most integrated Jewish population in Europe going back before the 20th century. Germans of the Jewish faith had major factories and businesses; they were leaders in the community and some were elected to office. In fact, many German Jews refused to flee their native country as the Nazis rose in power, because Germany didn't have a history of anti-Semitism as some European countries. German Jews at first thought they were safe since they and their families had lived in that country and contributed to its well-being for years and were known and liked by their non-Jewish neighbors. By the time they finally recognized the danger, it was too late for most of them.

The point being that too often we see only the Jews in their prison uniforms and the Germans in their military uniforms but the division really wasn't that sharp in real life. Nazi Germans were killing hundreds of thousands of citizens of their own country--that's what makes the whole thing even more horrible. In Germany, France, Romania, and all the other occupied countries, people time after time after time turned their own citizens over to the Nazis simply because they were a different religion.

For what it's worth.......

Saw this last night, and I feel the replies thus far have a pretty good read on the whole thing. This feels like the kind of movie a computer would make if you told it to try to win an Oscar: it inserts various heartstring-tugging elements, but misses out on the fact that it is not the elements themselves, but the point they come together to make, that helps a film resonate. None of the performances really stood out, Asa Butterfield was so-so, and the whole thing lacked a point.

The ending was so frustrating, though not for the obvious reasons. All I could think as it all came together was "what?! If this movie had these kinds of" -- forgive the expression -- "balls, where were they for the other 98% of the film?" It's horrible, of course, but it's also interesting, inventive, and gutsy. In other words, it's everything that the rest of the film wasn't.

Whenever I see such a dramatic ending, I usually find that I can run back through the film in my head and see various foreshadowings, and all sorts of new thematic meaning is fed into what's come before. In this case, it was just an event. It didn't flesh out or resolve anything. It just happened. I think you guys hit the nail on the head when you talk about Thewlis' reaction. The reaction was all we got; there was no overarching moral, no hard lesson learned, no nothing. It just happens, and then it's over. What a waste.

There is just one exception: there is a nice little parallel (intentional or not) between Thewlis' interrogation and punishment of Karl and his father's disloyalty, and his own son's demise. Bruno clearly, by film's end, has come to disagree with the party line. Fate itself prosecutes Bruno using his Father's own standards. Then again, this bitter irony is undermined by a) the fact that they make some similar points in the subplot with his mother's dissent and demise, and b) the fact that the movie isn't really about him for the most part.

Speaking of Thewlis' mother, I assume we're supposed to believe that she was carted off or killed by the Nazi Party? It seems so obvious that I feel silly even asking, but I figure it can't hurt.

Random divergence: the character of Karl was a joke. They're already Nazis...does the story gain anything by having one of them suddenly scream all the time? And would he really shriek at and talk down to the child of his commanding officer so readily? I thought the whole thing was a bit over the top. I have no problem with one of the officers there being strangely sadistic or cruel, but it came across as almost comical.

That leads me right into the next point: I can't agree more with the sentiment that the film's moves were telegraphed. Hearing that Thewlis' mother is "ill," seeing the smoke in the distance, and as shocking as the ending is in a vacuum, it's perfectly obvious what will happen the very moment that Bruno offers to crawl under the fence. Given how shocking the ending is meant to be, I think a much shorter duration of time between this decision and the film's conclusion would have been wise. When it takes ten minutes, we have plenty of time to realize where it all has to go, and to steel ourselves for it. If it actually took place just a minute or two after, the shock might be more pronounced. Of course, that may have been deliberate: the filmmakers may have felt that the turn of events was disturbing enough that people needed time to realize it was going to happen.

Anyway, as I said earlier, the ending bugs me, because it opens up lots of possibilities that never come together. I think you could easily go back and sprinkle in a few details, and use the ending as a way to reveal that the entire film was about the Father, or something of the sort. As it is it's not much more informative or complicated than a documentary about any child who is part of a horrible accident.

If there is any kind of theme or moral or message at all, I suppose it's simply that there are certain truths that are plainly obvious to the youngest or simplest of us, and that mistakes on a certain scale can only be made by more informed, intelligent people, smart enough to rationalize them away. I rather like the implication that even simplistic questions from a child about the Nazi philosophy is enough to reveal its ignorance, but the idea that children see certain moral issues with more clarity than adults is hardly revelatory enough to necessitate an entire film.

By the by, I notice via IMDB that Thewlis' character is merely named "Father." I don't think we even get so much as a last name. Given that the film goes well out of its way to use the term "Fatherland" a good half-dozen times, perhaps there's some overt symbolism in the book that may have been lost in the translation, something about the Father as a metaphor for all of Germany.

Nice review, Chris.

I figured that Sheila Hancock's character was involved in nothing more sinister than not wanting to have anything to do with her son's new job and feigning illness to get out of going to dinner. I didn't read anything more into it than that - double standards by Thewlis, of course, because her thoughts on the Nazi party are well known to him.

I wonder if anyone out there actually liked the film and see it as anything other than a join-the-dots morality tale?

I was thinking that too. I wish someone here had read the book, because it seems like we are missing something key when it comes to Karl. I got the impression that he may have been slightly jealous of Bruno. That maybe there were some father son dynamics between Karl and Bruno's father in the book that the movie left out. I am just speculating though. Karl's character just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The crush thing bothered me too. Certain things seemed to allude to the fact that Karl was probably at best inappropriate with Gretel, but we are never given any information. Seems to me his character should have either been more developed or written out completely. The movie was so short it is just not understandable why more time wasn't given to these details.

No other takers for this? That's a shame.

C'mon, people, we've got some really pithy critiques up! Return serve!

Would anyone object to me abusing my admin-y powers to bug the people who voted for this film but haven't posted here yet? Because I think I'd like to.

Of course! The best thing about being a benevolent dictator is getting to do stuff like that!

Of course, if you were as evil as me. you would out everyone involved...

Behold! The first Movie Club SHAAAAAAAME list! The MoFos below voted for this film, but have yet to weigh in.

• BadaBing
• Iroquois
• KasperKristensen
• RagingBull
• Swan
• zenderella

Partial-SHAAAAAAAME for rufnek, who has participated, though hasn't seen the movie. But I'll take that over absence. Also, I've excluded a couple users from this list with deferments, such as Spudly, who's got a newborn and a knee injury to contend with.

I will soon, in all likelihood, add myself to this list for shamefully harassing the people in question.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this film. I found the perfomances to be some of the most believable I've ever seen. But this movie is Such a tear-jerker. After viewing, I went and hugged my dad Just for not being a Nazi.

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I saw the movie a few weeks ago, and i have to say that it has something special.
Unlike many other Holocaust-WW2-Nazi movies, in this one we can see the "inside", the "behind of the scenes" of those thug-like Nazi commanders...
The family, doesn't always accept that now they have to pass that brainwash like the father in this case. they object.. and sometimes the consequences are bad...(like the grandmother) and sometimes there's just noting to do about it, except escaping (like the wife/mother).

Few scenes were quiet tense.. [the one when the officer yells at the poor old man spilling the wine] or the scene were the same officer shouts at the little Jewish boy...

but of course the most tense part was the end... hoping the father will make it on time to save his son, and understand the monstrosity of all of this...
but after all he will have to understand it the hard way, by losing his little clean, Aryan son, in the same gas shower in which the Jews he so hated died.

Thanks guys.

We needed a few more positive thoughts, for the sake of balance if nothing else.

I have never hugged my dad for not being a Nazi, by the way. I've put him in a headlock for being a ****. Does that count?

I'm not sure, but it got a laugh from me

What? You have to see a movie before you can comment on it? In my defense, my first comment on the film was that, based on TV ads, it looked interesting. I think reading reviews and comments by other participants gave me a pretty good insight into the basic plot. I never flamed the film--at most, I only questioned the premise that some members of the family didn't know what was going on at the concentraton camp when in real life Allied liberators commented over and over about the stench of burning flesh and the stacks of decaying bodies. At the end of World War II, most enemy civilians living in the vacinity of the death camps claimed not to have known what was going on despite the sight of trainloads of victims going into the camps and the stink of death around them. Patton's forces made sure those civilians were introduced to the horrors of the camp by forcing them to carry bodies by hand to mass graves.

Besides, I did make what in all due modesty I have to describe as a insightful comparision of the described revelation of the family's Nazi connection in this film with a similar scene in Cabaret (which I have seen). :-)

My not seeing this film is no reflection on its merits or demerits. Having read the histories of those camps and visited the holocaust memorial in Israel, I just can't stand to watch such movies, including Schindler's List.

I know, just playing around with you, hence the ridiculous abundance of capital letters and winking smilie face emoticon thingy.

In your view, how does the father-son relationship and ending of this film compare with that film some years ago about the Jewish father who maintained an act to keep his son from realizing they were in a death camp (can't remember the title of that film and didn't see it, either, but I did catch the final moments on TV sometime later). Sounds to me like there were elements in this film that are comparable to similar scenes in other films that were perhaps handled better.

As for elements of characters in a book that don't make it to the screen, in The Young Lions Brando played the nicest, most sympathetic and politically correct Nazi ever, while in the book, that character is a rapist in civilian life who embraces everything bad in the Nazi party, shoots (after a brief conversation with his victim) a defenseless American paratrooper whose parachute is caught in a tree, and kills death-camp prisoners in his attempt to escape the advancing Allies. In the film, good Nazi Brando breaks his weapon by beating it on a stump in frustration and horror over Nazi atrocities. In the book, he fatally shoots the Jewish American soldier played by Monty Cliff before Dean Martin's character kills him.

That's an interesting connection between father and Fatherland, which Germans seem always to have used in talking about their country. In the English language, there's not too much differnce in sound between father and Fehurer (Leader), which was both Hitler's title and role in Nazi Germany. So the symbolism seems likely.

Oh, I recognized and appreciated the joke, Yoda, and tried to reply in kind. I'm not as touchy as some might think.