Not as impressed as I'd hoped

Rating: Null/10 (22 July 2003)

I recently purchased this film, unseen, based on my Oscar-winning-performance collection. Adrien Brody, mostly unknown to me, charmed me during the awards,as I'm sure he did many. His performance was subtle and certainly as Oscar worthy as any of the other nominees. Something was lacking for me. The film overall was visually impressive, the use of color for a subject that seems to demand B&W was daring and in the end handled beautifully. I screened Schindler's List the next evening and discovered that the characters were so much more involving, from the smallest bitpart to the leads, they grabbed me & made me feel their experience in a way the the pianist never did. There was a heart and a soul to Schindler, we watched him grow as a man, as a human being almost against his will. His journey from the opening of the film to the closing moments affected me deeply. As a Jew myself I have seen tons of material relating to the holocaust and it is not as easy to move me as it is others. The pianist did not move me, I found the key characters strangely one note, I never really understood why they risked their lives to protect this man, I never understood how he felt about their doing so. Most of all, by giving me no pre-war context for his place within Warsaw, I was robbed of the chance to see the true/larger change for this man. It took only moments in Spielberg's film to establish a world of information about Shindler's former life, the brief episode of his wife's trip the Krakow tells the whole story perfectly. I do hate to be disappointed by a movie, my expectations are usually so low that it doesn't happen often. I strongly suggest viewing Rosemarys Baby, a Polanski masterpiece from my humble viewpoint. He's getting too sentimental in his mature years.