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| The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - Our attempt to unwind after a long week. |
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
- Stanley Kubrick
I believe in the power of film. It can be a very useful means in conveying a lesson. If done effectively, film can make you feel and make you think. I have heard many good things about the film we watched this evening: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Based on the previews, it seemed to be a fitting movie to culminate our visits in Auschwitz. However, it was not what I, nor the rest of the group, expected.
It was a very emotional film - it was an honest attempt to tug at the audience's heart strings - but it was just not believable. Anyone who has any knowledge about the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps during WWII would realize from the start that the story presented is nowhere near accurate. I realize this is a fictional film, but it is very misleading and does not display much evidence of research in terms of the film's context. Originally we were going to watch the film prior to our visits, but now I am glad that we waited to view it until after because we had the chance to become well informed on the subject whereas the film could have mislead us. I have several issues with the film:
- The plot is completely unbelievable. Something such as this never would have been allowed to happen. Many times, the families of the Nazis were known to share the same ideologies and sometimes to be just as cruel as their perpetrator relatives. It is not likely that the wife of the SS commandant would have been so emotional and opposed to her husband's actions. And usually, the children of the SS were sheltered from the situations of the camps or brought up in such a way as to accept what was happening if they knew of it.
- As far as historical accuracy is concerned this movie is a complete over-exaggeration. I may even go so far as to call it a severe misrepresentation. The child of the SS officer would not have been allowed near the fence. Most of the barbed wire fences, at least in Auschwitz, were also charged with an electric current. None of the passing of things between the fences would have ever happened. Guards would have also been patrolling the fence. The meetings between the two boys and the entrance of the SS officer's son into the camp are very far-fetched. A boy of eight years would most likely have not been working the camp. The Nazis usually exterminated children not capable of work (younger than teenagers) but if they kept younger children alive, I do not believe that they would be working in the camp as depicted here. The film also depicted prisoners working at the home of the SS officer. I don't believe this would have ever happened either - or at least I have never heard of such a thing.
The ending was especially ridiculous and very depressing. The film definitely manipulates the emotions of the audience during some scenes, but if you are educated enough to realize the mountain of untruths, the emotion is taken away because it is based upon nothing that really happened. The actual conditions of the camp were not even portrayed as that dismal. If anything, I believe that this film trivialized the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The end did not depict the death or the plight of the prisoners in the camp, rather the mother of the main character- the wife of the SS - crying over the loss of her son. Are we to feel sympathy for the perpetrator? I could not take this film seriously; it was unfortunate. The only redeeming quality of the film is perhaps that it acted as a test of our knowledge of the Holocaust as we had to distinguish fact from fiction while watching it.
For a more cynical review (which I also agree with) please see the following link:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/movies/07paja.html
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