good movie, but with problems

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2002)

I enjoyed certain things about SL. The story is quite good. Technically, the movie is very good. The acting is fine.
But, seeing how this film stays near the top of the "top 250", I feel compelled to rain on the parade a bit. Forgive me if I use this forum to focus on what I *didn't* like about the movie:
The scene at the train station--remember? Where people were scrawling their names on their luggage, and loading it onto boxcars on another line, then the audience is let in on the fact that the system had no intention of reuniting them with their belongings?--set the tone for the representation of evil that was the holocaust. It appeared that the immensity of the tragedy would be conveyed in this movie by equally grand and hauntingly indirect scenarios like this. But then the movie settles into what I call the "clean death" of countless shots to the head. I'm not saying that they should have shown the knee deep typhus-dead in abandoned barracks, an actual gassing, etc., etc. But the power of that train station scene subsequently wasn't matched by what came after.
I also felt that the "little girl in the pink coat" was a victim "for the rest of us"; a furtive hedging-of-the-bets which I have a funny, funny feeling might have been more-or-less foisted upon Spielburg by his producers. When we got tired of seeing Jews getting herded up and killed, the pink coat girl (who appeared to be a kind of goyim "innocent bystander") sort of "freshened our palates." And I think that's a poor substitute for more of the kind of effective and deeply moving stuff I alluded to above (the train station scene).
If you want your gut blown re the holocaust, watch Shoah.