The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas uses the viewpoint of childhood naïvete to critique the absurdities of the Holocaust," begins Andrew Schenker in Slant. "Problem is, these absurdities should already be pretty clear to the modern viewer, so such an approach seems, at best, misguided."

"In adapting Irishman John Boyne's acclaimed young-adult novel, writer-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) draws beautifully modulated performances from his two child actors, who navigate a full range of emotions from wonder to betrayal to guilt," writes Chuck Wilson in the Voice. "In the end, their characters meet a fate so absurdly melodramatic that I cringed. A moment later, it occurred to me that the finale might just devastate - and educate - middle- and high-school-age audiences themselves only a little less naive than Bruno, who could do worse than have this earnest, well-made film be their first Holocaust drama."

Updated through 11/9.

"As in much of Life Is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (both are Miramax films, it must be mentioned) witnesses the Holocaust from the point of view of a child, here eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield), the German son of a loving mother (Vera Farmiga) and a cold Nazi officer (David Thewlis, imbuing a likely caricature with multiple dimensions)," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for indieWIRE. "Going against everything that would make it derivative of Life Is Beautiful, most of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is surprisingly unsentimental and sober enough to put off complete denouncement of its intentions; but the ending raises questions serious enough to make one reconsider."

"[Tthe film develops in a delicate manner that is optimal for introducing the atrocities of the Holocaust in an uncompromising but measured mode," writes Stephen Snart in the L Magazine. "However, the film's shocking and crushing conclusion strikes me as unnecessarily cruel toward the viewer in a Lars Von Trier sort of way."

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher talks with Farmiga.

Updates, 11/7: "See Bruno run. See Bruno see a farm," and so forth, from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family. Better yet and in all sincerity: don't."

"There are plenty of subjects - old yellow hunting dogs, spirited folk bravely facing cancer - that can be easily milked for maximum pathos," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But you've reached rock bottom when you start milking the death camps... I realize that at least in vague terms, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is defensible as a tale of hope and friendship in the face of unspeakable and inhuman horror. And Herman takes great pains to keep the proceedings as tasteful as possible - which makes it worse."

"The premise is unquestionably strained, as Butterfield's ignorance becomes more and more unlikely, but from the striking cinematography to the nuanced characters to the refreshingly original approach to the time period, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has enough going on that it doesn't have to pull too hard on such a slender thread," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not a great film at the level of art (or cinema), but a great film at the level of its concept," argues Charles Mudede in the Stranger.

"The film's two levels - metaphoric and nitty-gritty - don't mesh until the devastation of the closing sequence, which both indulges in and transcends melodrama," writes Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times.

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher talks with Thewlis.

Brent Simon talks with Farmiga for New York.

"I don't think I've seen - at least since equally offensive concentration camp fable, Life Is Beautiful - a movie so reliant on human stupidity to achieve its effect, so totally dishonest in its insistence on that quality (which it presents as innocence) to achieve its narrative goals," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "I don't know if a movie as simpleminded and emotionally shameless as this one definitively proves that fiction is not a suitable vehicle for the consideration of crimes as vast as the Holocaust. But it will do until the next historical travesty comes along."

Update, 11/8: "[T]he larger problem of the Holocaust movie glut is the frequent reliance on the duality of good and evil," writes Lawrence Levi at Nextbook. "Nazis are evil. Jews are, for the most part, good. The reduction is simplistic, unrealistic, and dull. There are, thankfully, exceptions - The Counterfeiters, for instance, or The Pianist - that explore the challenge of behaving morally under extreme conditions."

Update, 11/9: Susan King talks with David Hayman for the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2008 12:48 PM