Should i call it a war movie? or should I call it a horror movie? Not everybody ranted and raved about this movie. Some said that it was the most depressing movie of the year! I ventured to watch it, since the book had taken by breath away!
'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' tells a brutal story. Bruno cannot fathom the great horrors that happen around him. He is protected by the high walls of his father's large mansion (though not large enough in his eyes compared to their house in Berlin). He cannot image why his father left the cosy comforts of Berlin to come to the countryside. And neither can he fathom awhy the people in the neighbouring farm don't wear anything except striped pyjamas. His search for a playmate leads him to the huge barb-wire fence and the little figure who sits staring at it all the time. As their friendship blossoms across this barrier, the reader is swept into the maelstrom of its heartbreaking an inevitable ending. The stunning narration reads like a children's book, as if written to be read out to a kid tucked cosily under sheets, waiting for his bedtime story.
However, 'The Boy...' as a movie disappoints. To me it would perhaps qualify as one of the weakest screenplay adaptations of a book. It's perhaps futile to expect such a narrative to be efficiently transferred on to the silver screen, but the emotions of the little child is lost in the screenplay. Asa Butterfield as Bruno just about passes muster. The innocence of little Bruno that one comes to imagine in the book is not completely conveyed through the eyes of Butterfield. Both David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga have excelled in their parts. But Farmiga paints a picture of an aristocratic lady, who seems to want to ignore what happens outside, rather than that of the anguished mother who is concerned and wants to protect her children from the actions of her husband, and Thewlis is good, but not as menacing as he is presented in the book. The most lovable character is little Shmuel, the little Jewish boy, and the best moments in the movie are those little conversations he has with Bruno across the fence. They are bound together in their solitude, but neither of them can comprehend the other's world.
The second world war was one of the darkest periods of the last century - a time in which unimaginable horrors were enacted. 'The Boy...' makes muted and veiled references to these horrors, completely staying away from the graphic depiction of them. There is not a single shot fired, nor are there bloodied bodies falling like flies. Even as the screenplay takes us through the comfortabl life of the aristocratic soldier's family one cannot but shudder at the thought of what goes on outside that cocoon of comfort. Perhaps it is this foreboding sense of doom that really gives "The Boy..." its magnetic appeal. It is indeed depressing. The movie IS depressing. If you do not want to spend the rest of your weekend with a heavy heart, stay away from this movie on a Friday night. It's sure to make you cry.
As for me, perhaps I should not have read the book first...I would then have cried more.
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