More about The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
The Holocaust Through the Lens of a Child
By Rex Reed
The New York Observer
Excerpt
November 4, 2008
At the movies, as in life, there is nothing more harrowing to think about or painful to observe than children in peril. At a time when a lot of people will not go near a film about the Holocaust, it's quite brave to make a new one (there are three coming out before Christmas). The Boy in the Striped Pajamas shows an aspect of the greatest atrocity in the history of civilization through the eyes of children, which makes it doubly risky. See it at all costs. It is both wonderful and devastating.
Directed by Mark Herman (Little Voice) and faithfully adapted from the best-selling novel by Irish writer John Boyne, it's about the heartbreaking friendship forged by the son of an SS concentration camp commandant and a young Jew imprisoned behind the barbed wire of the camp itself. Set in the optimistic innocence of childhood, before the darkness of reason, it tells of a privileged 8-year-old child named Bruno, oblivious to the storm clouds gathering above his family's beautifully kept home. Outside, scenes of passing trucks dragging away the dispossessed through the cobblestone streets of Berlin move across his line of vision like movements in an action movie. But things are about to shadow his complacent reverie when Bruno's father, a respected career military man with a great value to the Reich (calmly played with cool restraint by David Thewlis) is promoted and assigned to a new, top-secret job in a remote place with the strange sounding name of Auschwitz...
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