A film about the Holocaust made for children and financed by Walt Disney is bound to divide audiences. Should such a serious subject be dealt with in this manner?

Star rating ***
Dir: Mark Herman
With: Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga

A film about the Holocaust made for children and financed by Walt Disney is bound to divide audiences. Should such a serious subject be dealt with in this manner? The French film-maker Claude Lanzmann would certainly say no, it shouldn't. Lanzmann's own film about the Holocaust, the BAFTA award-winning 1985 documentary Shoah, is almost ten hours long, includes no archive footage whatsoever and is instead comprised of interviews with concentration camp survivors, witnesses and ex-Nazis. Lanzmann's view is the Holocaust is too terrible and too complex a subject to be dramatically reconstructed - he thought Steven Spielberg went too far with Schindler's List.

On the other hand, the Italian film-maker and comedian Roberto Benigni might well say it's acceptable, even desirable, to make a film about the Holocaust for children. After all, Benigni wrote, directed and starred in 1997's Life is Beautiful, a tragi-comic film about survival in a concentration camp that was nominated for seven Oscars and won three. For Benigni, the Holocaust is a subject that should be represented in mainstream culture so that it will not be forgotten by future generations.

So the key issue surrounding The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - in addition to whether or not it's a good piece of cinema in its own right - is this: is the way in which the film deals with the Holocaust bona fide or bogus? Does the film contribute to our continued understanding of the Holocaust, or does it obfuscate it?

Well, there's no denying the seriousness of purpose here. It's adapted from Irish children's author John Boyne's bestselling 2006 novel (the first draft of which was supposedly completed during a two-and-a-half-day writing frenzy) by English filmmaker Mark Herman, who's best known for his social realism-tinged working class comedy dramas Brassed Off, Little Voice and Purely Belter. And it's produced by fellow Englishman David Heyman, who's known to be very sincere about the educational elements of the Harry Potter film franchise that he's in charge of. Finally, the most recognisable member of the cast is David Thewlis, the no-nonsense Lancashire-born actor from Mike Leigh's Naked who knows a thing of two about dedication to his work.

Thewlis plays a Nazi officer who's put in charge of a concentration camp and moves his family of four from Berlin to the countryside, where the post is located. His eight-year-old son Bruno (newcomer Asa Butterfield) immediately takes a dislike to his new life. With his friends left behind in the city and his older sister more interested in playing with her dolls than her brother, the bored boy moons about the new house, expressly forbidden by his parents from going outside. Eventually, he defies them and sneaks out of the house and through some woods to the nearby "farm" he spotted from his bedroom window. At the edge of it, behind a high-wire fence, he meets a boy of his own age named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), who has a shaven head and wears the titular striped night-ware-cum-uniform. Over the coming weeks, the boys befriend one another, but Bruno becomes increasingly troubled by what Shmuel tells him about living on the farm, by what he hears his parents talking about at home, and by his tutor, who proclaims that all Jews are evil ...

All of the above - and worse to come - unfolds through the eyes of Bruno. It's a clever narrative device that allows Herman, as it did Boyne, to approach the subject matter from a respectful distance. Accepting that it's impossible to fully understand or realistically represent the death camps, Herman uses the naivety of his innocent young protagonist to fashion a kind of fable that hints at the true horrors. That said the film doesn't shy away from the horror, either. The ending, while in no way graphic, is very dark and very disturbing, and wholly appropriate.

The young performers acquit themselves well enough, but the acting honours go to the grown-ups. Thewlis does a marvellous job of investing his cruel commandant and yet caring father with real humanity, while American actress Vera Farmiga convinces with her nicely judged portrayal of an ignorant wife and mother who finally wakes up to the horrors being perpetuated around her. The complicity of the adults makes for a satisfyingly complex moral problem, one that works well in contrast to the film's relatively simple fable-like story.

Where the film is let down, however, is in Herman's rather dull direction. Lacking a stylistic touch, his efforts come off looking and feeling like a somewhat pedestrian television drama, the kind broadcast during the god slot on Sunday afternoons. Which is a shame, because The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is otherwise a worthy attempt to present a very difficult subject to a new audience.

Despite what Claude Lanzmann might say, however, it would have benefited from a more cinematic treatment.