Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Directed by Mark Herman
C
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Nov. 7

There are few cheap set-ups simplistic filmmakers like more than unlikely friendship. Take, for example, the fox and the hound. But let's not forget another much-adored staple: the one where the horrors of atrocity are portrayed through the eyes of innocent and very adorable children. Based on the novel by John Byrne, The Boy With the Striped Pajamas utilizes both.

The film doesn't think small, either. The subject is the Holocaust, and its protagonists are Asa Butterfield, the bright-eyed son of a Nazi commandant (David Thewlis, a long way from Naked) and Jack Scanlon, a very cute kid in a concentration camp.

Schlepped from swinging Berlin to a country estate close to the camp, the bored, lonely and curious Butterfield yawns through lessons meant to indoctrinate him into the Nazi worldview, even as his older sister robotically adorns her walls with Hitler Youth posters. Butterfield eventually finds himself on the other side of an electrically charged fence with Scanlon, with whom he establishes a quick friendship.

Au Revoir Les Enfants this ain't. Instead, it's more like the Disney doozy Swing Kids: a family film that dumbs down and trivializes a subject it doesn't remotely have the chops to handle. Director Mark Herman, previously of comedies like Little Voice, rarely turns down the chance for schmaltz, though his handling of the scenes between Butterfield and Scanlon boast relative restraint and sensitivity.

Not so with the Nazi heavies, who cartoonishly bellow phrases like, "If you can find a nice Jew, you would be the best explorer in the world!" (The decision to have German characters speak in posh British accents accidentally makes Nazis a bit less scary.) Meanwhile, the character played by Vera Farmiga--a conflicted wife/mother who's horrified to learn what's really emanating from those smoke stacks--smacks of wishful thinking and historical revisionism.

That said, things don't turn truly questionable till the final act, which takes this heartwarming yarn in a mega-grim direction, complete with a cruelly ironic twist that would put a smirk on Rod Serling's face. Despite the PG-13 rating, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is clearly aimed at children--few adults need to learn the Nazis weren't nice. That makes the "uncompromising" capper potentially more traumatic than the shooting of Bambi's mom.

Role Models
Directed by David Wain
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Nov. 7

Directed by State alum David Wain, who co-wrote with star Paul Rudd and colleague Ken Marino, Role Models casts Rudd as a "dickish" thirtysomething who, alongside crude co-worker/bud Seann William Scott (not terrible, miraculously), is part of an altercation involving a car shaped like a minotaur, a tow truck and a statue of a horse.

Forced to chose between a month in prison and 150 hours as part of a Big Brothers-type program, they hesitantly choose the latter, only to be paired not with life-affirming, saucer-eyed moppets but a socially retarded fantasy role-playing nerd (Superbad's Christopher Mintz-Plasse, merely pretty good) and a foul-mouthed, boobs-loving black kid (Bobb'e J. Thompson).

Wain, whose directorial work so far includes parodies (the pretty sublime Wet Hot American Summer) and sketch comedy (the decidedly non-sublime The Ten), goes for a straightforward, I-can't-believe-it's-not-Judd-Apatow style of comedy, replete with arrested-development dudes, potty humor and ad-libbed breaks. (No, seriously. Apatow did not produce.)

It doesn't, as one would hope, completely subvert the pricks-meet-cute-brats formula, but it does tweak it enough that it's genuinely funny, fresh and slightly--very, very, very slightly--moving. To put it another way, this is the kind of movie in which Scott breaks the ice with Thompson via an inspired dissection of Kiss' "Love Gun" that ends with him enthusiastically professing, "You see, his dick is the gun!"

Consistently hilarious, right down to the dorkiest third act ever, Role Models serves as the best vehicle yet for Rudd's considerable comedic chops. Lording miserably over the procession of idiots and freaks with a mix of toxic derision and existential dread, he does more with a blank stare than almost anyone since Buster Keaton and he somehow makes his de- assholification believable. And he aids in making Seann William Scott tolerable, which is truly yeoman's work.