Yet Another Holocaust Movie

Rating: 1/10 (27 February 2005)

I left "Schindler's List" haunted. I left "Life is Beautiful" incredibly sad. I left "The Pianist" bored and very, very sleepy.
I'm not saying the Holocaust isn't a worthy movie subject, but it's all been done before, and much better. There's not much to care about in "The Pianist". As told here, Vladek Szpielman's story isn't especially compelling or interesting. He survives the deprivation of the Warsaw ghetto, goes into hiding, endures more deprivation, then plays piano again. The end.
Szpielman seems strangely unaffected by the horror unfolding around him. He witnesses various atrocities, sees his family get deported, and watches 2 executions and a cremation, yet his facial expression never changes. He goes from starving before liberation to playing the piano on the radio afterward, with no explanation of what happened in between. And why does a man in hiding pull aside the curtains to watch a shooting outside?
I'm not afraid of a film where most of the action is internal (like "The Hours"), but this film has almost none of that. We get no clues about what Szpielman thinks or how he feels about anything. "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful" convey the horrors of he Holocaust much more effectively, including their effect on the survivors. "The Diary of Anne Frank" tells a much better story about life in hiding.
To those who say Holocaust movies are needed as long as there are Holocause deniers, I can only say this; there literally hundreds of Holocaust movies out there. If a small number of people are still denying the existence of the Holocaust, making another 100 movies isn't going to convince them.