Steph and I watched this film last night and I was left with a feeling of ‘oh’. This was no profound sense of ‘ohhhhhhh!’ or stilted shock of ‘Oh!’, but a mere ‘oh’. I actually dreamed a different ending to the film which would have been definitively more riveting. [PLOT SPOILER COMING]
In the end, the movie has a cast of oppositions. The husband and wife, the Nazi commander and his mother, the junior officer and his father, the brother and sister, and the inner turmoil of the main character fighting between two conceptions of ‘Jews’. The ending, however, was just bizarre clearly expecting a mildly credulous audience.
The story just didn’t make sense. I’m not sure what it’s meant to accomplish. What was the moral of the story? Here are some possibilities that I worked through:
- Don’t marry a Nazi.
- Don’t make friends with imprisoned Jews.
- Don’t be so naive.
- Don’t gas Jews because your kid might accidentally get gassed with them.
- Don’t be a Nazi, because unexpected consequences can be ultimately bad.
It’s almost as if the end of the movie was a big ‘I told you something like this would happen’ from the mother to the father. The reason I’m struggling to grasp the point is that the movie is clearly meant to play on the tension between the characters, but the audience would surely identify with only one side of that tension. Are we seriously ever meant to empathize with the Final Solution or the soldiers who carried it out. No! We hear the voices of the mothers and the children who clearly identify the incredulity of the Solution.
So we enter the film knowing that Nazism is very bad and are never enticed to think otherwise. We leave the film thinking that Nazism is bad particularly because it killed two innocent people: Shmuel and Bruno (the Jewish boy and Nazi’s son respectively). A story about a car accident could have had the same effect. What was the Nazi’s reason for they intending to kill Shmuel but not Bruno? It was because Shmuel was Jewish. Nothing new about that. The only interesting twist to the plot is the climax where the irony of their friendship entangles leading to their shared deaths.
Interestingly, the tutor’s inculcating speeches about how Jews are the ruin of Germans comes to full fruition when Bruno is killed by coming into the camp in order to help Shmuel find his presumably dead father. This particular German actually was ruined by this particular Jew. And while his Nazi father is attempting to exterminate the evil Jews, his own evil ends up exterminating his own son. But this irony doesn’t save the movie as a whole. It only makes the movie mildly engaging.
My wife noticed that the only ‘walk away’ point she took was that if the parents had talked with their children honestly about what they were doing, then that would have at least prevented Bruno’s death.
The movie was good overall. But the vagueness of time and place make it hard to swallow. There are no names or incidents that would help you connect it to an historical event. Normally, that would be forgivable, except for the fact that the entire movie is set around one of the most infamous events in world history. You could take this plot and play it out almost step for step in any setting to the same effect–actually, to greater effect. If the Jews were cows, the place were Texas, the death camp a feed lot and the gas chambers a slaughter house, then the rhetorical effect would draw on the audiences mixed feeling about the whole scenario. But because Nazism is generally recognized as a heinous form of badness, that tension is absent and the film falls flat.
