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Vera Farmiga as Bruno's mother

Bruno and Gretel are also subjected to a more formal sort of indoctrination in the form of Herr Liszt (Jim Norton), a tutor whose lessons are filled with Nazi, racist propaganda. Ever the willing student, Gretel accepts what she is taught, but Bruno is too bored to pay attention. He does not object out of any sort of moral principle; he would simply much rather read adventure stories and play at being a soldier.

Throughout the film, despite these influences, Bruno keeps his innocence, and this leads to some strikingly poignant moments. The best, by far, comes when Bruno skins his knee and Pavel (David Hayman), the Jewish prisoner who peels the house's potatoes, tends to the wound. Bruno insists that the wound is very bad, and Pavel insists it is not. Gradually you realize Pavel must have been a doctor before he was sent to the concentration camp—but even though you can see this revelation coming, the actual dialogue between the two characters, and the way Bruno must have hurt Pavel when he thought he was being friendly, and the way Pavel sees past the pain and responds to Bruno as gracefully as he can, is a genuine tear-jerker.

The bulk of the movie, however, revolves around Bruno's friendship with Shmuel, the striped-pajama boy on the other side of the electric fence. And here the movie falters. Bruno pays Shmuel many visits, yet somehow never figures out what is going on within the camp itself. Their meetings are obscured by a pile of stuff that sits near the fence and blocks the view of those on the inside, and no guards ever seem to walk around the perimeter or catch the boys in the middle of their games, their conversations, and their exchanges of food. This is all incredibly unrealistic, but on a certain level, we can almost forgive it, if we see the film as a "fable"—not unlike, say, Life Is Beautiful, which similarly concerned a boy who is shielded from the truth of the Holocaust and who similarly believes it is nothing but a game.

Bruno befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy in a concentration camp

The problem is, the film gets increasingly serious as it goes, and it clearly wants to break our hearts if it can. But the very fact that it is a "fable" and somewhat divorced from reality robs these scenes of their intended devastating power—or it did for me, at any rate. Where the filmmakers were clearly aiming for suspense, I ultimately found myself accepting and even demanding the inevitable, simply because there are only so many ways a "fable" like this can end once certain elements are in place.

And after it was all over, I wasn't entirely sure that this fable had done what it was supposed to do. Say what you like about Life Is Beautiful, but the film is not only about acts of denial and self-deception, it actually is an act of denial and self-deception because the characters—and the narrator—never address certain messy truths. That makes it an interesting film to discuss long after the credits have rolled. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, however, is ultimately about the dawning of the truth—the "dark hour of reason" alluded to at the beginning—but it's kind of hard to make that point when you're asking the audience to suspend its disbelief.

There is still plenty to chew on here, though. By making the Nazis seem so "normal," the film prompts us to ask what evil we might be tolerating in our own society simply because it stays hidden and/or because it seems like the normal, accepted thing to do. It prompts us to be vigilant in the raising of our children. And it prompts us to admit, however sadly, that childlike innocence is not sufficient in a world like ours—that we need to be wise as serpents even as we remain innocent as doves.

Our friends at Heartland Film Festival have created an educational discussion guide for youth, meant to be used after watching the film and reading the book. Click here.

Talk About It

1. How does seeing the story from Bruno's eight-year-old point of view affect the way you perceive the characters, such as his father? What do we see that is not shown from Bruno's point of view? Why does the film let us see these things? Why does the film not let us see other things?

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