by Eugene Curran CM

I am still in two minds about my reaction to this film, adapted from the 2006 novel by Irish author, John Boyne. The 'charm' of the novel, if such a word can be used in the context of overwhelming brutality, is that it envisages the horrors of the Nazi Concentration Camps from the perspective of eight-year-old Bruno and the friendship he strikes up with young Shmuel through the mud and barbed-wire of the fence of such a death-camp.

The film (directed by Mark Herman) has the same 'small' quality to it. Nothing happens that does not involve Bruno and that does not take place within the limited terrain that marks the boundaries of his childhood and, significantly, of his understanding. His world is a Berlin home and its surrounding streets, the car that takes him to his new home, that home itself and its enclosed front garden. It is a world where war is a game that boys play and soldiers, most especially his own father, protect that world and all it stands for. Bruno sees himself as an explorer but, in fact, even his exploring is limited and does not reach far beyond the confines of his back-garden. The 'heroic explorer' is a greedy, self-centred and somewhat spoiled little boy that it is not immediately easy to like. The 'heroic explorer' is also, in some ways, more of a prisoner than those in the camp; his parameters more limited, his life more lonely and his gates, too, patrolled by soldiers and their guard dogs.

The film does capture this 'small panorama' well; the great and sprawling Auschwitz camp is reduced to one tiny corner where the two boys meet. Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is only able to interpret reality by his own terms of reference; the camp is 'a farm', the Jews are 'farmers'. Indeed, he has no concept at all of what a Jew might be. The other side of the fence is more attractive to him because, he imagines, Shmuel plays there with his friends; and this he imagines even before he sees the propaganda film for which his father is responsible – images of smiling, happy, carefree people in this place which is portrayed more as summer camp than labour camp.

Bruno's 'great sin' is that of a small boy – he denies his friendship with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) – which is understandable; he is scared witless by the cruel Lieutenant Kotler (and you would be too if you saw those eyes!). Both the book and the film emphasise that it is the smallest actions that reveal our truest nature; how we treat a friend, a wife, a junior or a child. More is conveyed by the touch of a hand on an arm than by shouted orders or screamed declarations. We do not witness large-scale evil, or goodness, in this film; we do not see the work of the camps, the ovens are only seen when they are not working and we are spared the graphic horror of 'The Final Solution'. Bruno's typical boyish self-centredness is outweighed by his loyalty to a friend. Father's slide into brutishness is shown by his lack of filial piety at his mother's funeral, by his facile acceptance of his 'duty' and by his cruelty to the wife he loves. We do not see him 'at work' in the camp, an interesting contrast with the portrayal of Amon Goth (Ralph Fiennes) the camp commandant in Schindler's List.

Yet, somehow, something of the 'smallness' of a young boy's world is lost in the transfer from written word to screen image. A key moment in the book is the dinner party attended by 'The Fury' (Bruno's attempt at 'Fuhrer') and the naming of the camp as 'Out-With'; neither of these are shown or even referred to in the film and, in that move, something seems to have been lost. Yet, the sight of Bruno coming across the pile of naked dolls in the basement, now discarded by his sister Gretl (Amber Beattie), is a child's version of the images of piled and naked bodies seen and photographed when the camps were liberated.

And, in its childlike simplicity, it is, somehow as horrific as the latter image. Some other things are down-played too in the film: the role and significance of his grandmother (Sheila Hancock), appalled at the monster her Gestapo son has become; the importance of Pavel (David Hayman), the Jewish doctor now reduced to peeling potatoes in the camp commandant's kitchen; the significance of the receding importance of Berlin in Bruno's life.

Bruno understands reality only in so far as he is capable of reaching and that is not very far. When he has to wait for Shmuel, he eats the chocolate that he had brought with him to feed the starving boy. He cannot understand that Pavel was once a doctor or that there are undercurrents in the lives of the adults around him. And yet, in many ways, we are shown that the adults have little better understanding; Father (David Thewlis) excuses everything on the basis that it is for the good of the country. We see the hardening of the carapace of Father as he reports Kotler because the young man's father opposes the Nazi regime; yet as Mother (Vera Farmiga) points out, Father's own mother was an outspoken critic of the system. Father has lost any empathy for others. Mother, on the other hand, we see coming to some recognition of the underlying evil and inhumanity of what is happening; she moves from a complaint that 'a Jew' is in the house to thanking the man for protecting her son and bandaging his leg.

Grandfather, kind and affable, is seen to parrot Nazi propaganda and does not allow himself to hear anything said against it. Herr Liszt, the tutor (Jim Norton) feeds the children a strict diet of propaganda, reading aloud from 'Mein Kampf', and refusing to acknowledge Bruno's questions. It asks the question; how easily do I accept the 'status quo', how facilely do I repeat the catch-calls of the day? The 'charming horror' of the attraction of evil is best captured in the character of the young Lieutenant, Kotler (Rupert Friend). There is no doubt that he is handsome (like his real-life girl-friend, Kiera Knightley, he has cheekbones that could cut diamonds) and he turns the head of young Gretl, from dolls to Bund Deutscher Madchen (League of German Girls). Blond, tall and strong, he is the embodiment of the Aryan ideal, yet Bruno recognises the latent brutality that bursts out when he attacks the old and feeble Pavel and the young Shmuel. As the smoke from the incinerating fires darkens the sky, he turns to Mother and says "They (the Jews) smell even worse when they are dead" – there is a viciousness there not only towards the dead but towards the woman he addresses. Yet there is some recognition also of his vulnerability – his estrangement from his father – and we feel almost sorry for him when he gets caught in Father's snare, which leads to the young man being sent to the Russian Front, and almost certain death. Father, loved, admired and gentle, has become cruel, vindictive and petty.

The film is, to use an over-used term, flawed. Mark Herman, the director, also wrote the screen-play and it is a sensitive adaptation. The colours are muted, the action sedate, the tone elegiac. He avoids any heavy-landed 'blood and guts', any gratuitous violence, any uncalled for shocking images. And that, perhaps, is where the flaw lies. While the book can leave large spaces for the reader to fill from their imagination and their understanding of history, in the visual context that same approach seems almost to remove any life-blood from the film. At its low-points (and there are some) it can seem insipid, even vapid. It needed to have a little more 'bite', to be a little less delicate in portraying the story. I looked around the cinema; some young ladies were texting on their phones and conversing. The film did not hold their attention as it should. My two nephews liked it very much but admitted that it was, sometimes, 'boring', though both of them love the book and were enthralled by it.

Still, having said all that, the film, does manage to convey something that the book cannot; the true horror of the situation only becomes apparent at the conclusion of the story. Without revealing the denouement, the family becomes enmeshed in the machinations of the system they support. Across a crowded concentration camp, cutting into silence, only two sounds are heard; the voice of a father calling for his child and the wail of a mother, screaming in grief.