Child Molester Tells Story of Polish Jews -- WHY?

Rating: 6/10 (31 October 2007)

Make no mistake this film is about the pianist Szpilmann, not about Roman Polanski. It is NOT Polanski's life, not his story. Others might forget that Polanski is a convicted child molester wanted by Federal authorities for statutory rape of a 13 year old girl. Polanski fled America to avoid prison. Some men might call statutory rape Getting Lucky but generally not when the girl is 13, definitely not if the girl is drugged-up by the assailant in order to assure her co-operation. I say it's reprehensible and Mr. Polanksi needs to return to face his crime.
THE PIANIST is the very personal story of Szpilmann and his ordeal in surviving the Warsaw Ghetto -- which 95% did not survive; the awful events of that time compellingly told in an on-the-level manner not seen before in any of the hundreds of films dealing with World War II with focus on the Jews.
That's the trouble, the focus is too often on the Jews. Young people today think the whole war was about the Jews. It wasn't. In Warsaw, while the Germans were killing Jews in the Ghetto, they were killing non-Jews not in the Ghetto in greater numbers. About 90% of the victims of Germany's invasion of Poland were Catholic. Where are the movies about Catholics? In Warsaw, one of the historic Catholic churches had been converted into a hospital. When the Germans arrived they at once massacred everybody in the hospital including the medical staff and buried everyone alive or dead by exploding the building. Nope, it wasn't just Jews.
Szpilman is certainly entitled to have his story told, but taken in the larger context of too many World War II films telling about the Jews (8 million dead) and ignoring the 80 million others, it plays like propaganda.