I prefer GOOD films about the holocaust

Rating: 3/10 (29 January 2003)

It's not that this is yet another film about the holocaust. Hard though they may be to watch, when you have one of the most horrific real-life nightmares perpetrated on a completely innocent community as you had in the Warsaw Ghetto situation, films will be made and should be made about it. This happened just 60 years ago, but it's right out of some dark ages tale of Vlad the Impaler or something -- innocents rounded up and slaughtered wholesale for no reason whatsoever -- just because they could be. Just to satisfy some twisted despot's profane sense of reality. If anything, more films should be made about the holocaust.
Unfortunately, when films are made about this most sad episode of the 20th century, the tendency to celebrate each film equally understandably arises. No one wants to accidentally align themselves with the few warped minds who suggest it never happened or that it should have happened by saying anything bad about a film about the holocaust. But, in the hope of encouraging good films about the horror the Nazis inflicted, I will now attempt to do just that.
What I loathed about this film was that the Nazis were the most interesting part of it. Our hero is a nice man who plays the piano very well. There are some other nice people who help him. His family is nice. But even the most interesting act of benevolence in the picture is performed by a Nazi officer.
What was Polanski thinking? Story! Story! Story!
Beware, the following paragraph is a total *** SPOILER ***
Honest to God, here is the plot that unravels over two and a half mind-numbing hours: A Jewish piano player narrowly escapes when the Nazis take over Poland and evacuate all the Jews to death camps. He waits around doing very little in particular until the Russians come and "liberate" Poland. That's it. That's the entire plot. True though it may be, truth is not always stranger than fiction. Sometimes, it's downright boring. The truth, for example, is that I got out of bed this morning and came to work. True, yes. But dull, definitely.
This film is a total snoozerama! I kept waiting for our piano player to join the resistance and take out a few Nazis; or have an interesting relationship with one of his benefactors; or carve a piano into a hang-glider and fly to Allied territory. Something. Anything! Instead we are treated to long, long scenes of our hero fiddling about in empty apartments or sifting through rubble for a bite to eat or having rather ordinary conversations with his family or those who help him.
I mean, on some level, I get it -- he's the penultimate victim and survivor and artist; somehow immune to the violence because of the sublime expression in his fingers. But THAT is a half-hour short subject film AND NOT a two-and-a-half hour feature film. It just isn't. It's just damned rude to suggest otherwise.
Damned rude.
This movie review by Erik Gloor