Vastly over-rated and highly simplistic

Rating: 3/10 (23 June 2003)

With a rating of 95 percent at Rotten Tomatoes and a place in the top 50 at IMDB I was expecting this to be a challenging film about the Holocaust. This however was not it. All this film says about the Holocaust was that life was tough then, little else. This is a rather obvious truth for everyone except Holocaust deniers, so why spend two hours telling us this. The film has story that is much too conventional and one that unfortunately lacks any great meaning.
The depiction of the Germans is perhaps the most straightforward you are likely to see. All you get is a bunch of stereotypical cinematic Nazis without any subtlety, until the final twenty minutes, when, SPOILER, Spillman runs into perhaps the only good German in all of Poland, if you go by the depiction of the Germans up to this point, who allows Spillman to escape.
This film simply alludes to some major questions instead of going into any depth. It shows a Jewish character who was from a certain point of view helping the Nazis, yet we do not see why this character is doing what he is doing. At least not in any depth.
One of the most remarkable things about this film is that it is about a Pianist, someone you would expect would have a soul. However, Spillman is simply a non-character which makes him being a pianist seem rather superfluous. This, however like the rather brief reference to the Merchant of Venice seems to be Polanski's main tool in this film: to allude to things that are deep and worthwhile, while saying nothing of the sort himself.
A brief glimpse through some of the reviews will find that a lot of critics have a rather simplistic view of the Third Reich, which may explain why they liked this rather simplistic film. One critic wrote that the Nazis were for barbarism and challenged everything that was beautiful and pure. This in turn would lead them to oppose Spillman and his profession: the professional pianist. This, however is not a rather simplistic view of the Nazi regime. The music that the Nazis opposed most strongly was modern music, in particularly the atonalism of the sort written by the great composer Schoenberg. This music was viewed by the Nazis as being crude. Hitler, himself was Wagner fanatic. However, the issue of Wagner opens up a lot of major historical issues that I can't go into. If, as some film critics are implying that this film is saying these things about the Third Reich, then I think this is a sad reflection of the intellectual state of modern critics. Although we may find The Third Reich totally repulsive we must not take the simplistic that it was a place where all great music was neglected, with the same being true for the Soviet Union. These regimes had a particular view of what was great in music, and a lot of these composers, the German composers admired by the Nazis and the Russian composers who worked within the Soviet regime are greats in music. The important thing to realise is that these regimes idealised music and other works of art and that is where the problem lies. The thinking behind this was quite often quite complex, with thinkers such as Hegel leading the way. Personally, I thought that the film made no such comment on the Third Reich, but if it did I find little validity in it.