Best Holocaust movie I've seen

Rating: 9/10 (2 March 2003)

I've seen what I guess I would consider the three big Holocaust movies of recent years--Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful, and now the Pianist. Now, it's been awhile since I saw the first two, but I believe that the Pianist is the best one of the three for me. It's also the Best Picture of the year, whether the Academy picks it or not!
I was thinking totally different things after I watched this movie than I was after I had watched Schindler's List. I remember thinking about how awful it must have been to go through what all those people went through after Schindler's List; all through the Pianist, all I could think about was the evil that human beings were committing against each other and wonder how that's even possible. So while The Pianist doesn't portray the entire ordeal that the Jewish people endured from beginning to end quite like Schindler's List, I think it does a better job of communicating the even more terrifying idea that humans can be so evil.

****Spoilers****

The perfect example of this from the movie is when the Germans enter the apartment across the street from the family in the ghetto, and when the grandfather of the other family cannot stand up, they wheel him over to the balcony and dump him over.

Of course, the evil that human beings are capable of is not the only thing this movie portrays. I love the climax of the movie, when the main character has his final encounter with the German who helps him. "How can I ever thank you?" he asks. "Don't thank me," the German replies. "Thank God. He wants us to survive." That doesn't seem to make much sense, considering everything else we've seen in the movie! If God wants us to survive, why is he letting all this other stuff happen? Well, for some reason, all this evil does go on, despite God's existence, but he wants us to survive, and he does preserve a remnant. That's the entire history of the Jewish people--not just during the Holocaust!

As some other posters have pointed out, the movie does a good job of showing both good and evil in the Germans, good and evil in the Jewish community, and good and evil in the Poles--both sides of human nature in all groups. It's not black and white.

It's amazing to contrast the struggles of the characters in a movie like this one, and the characters in a movie like, say, The Hours. Now, I thought The Hours was a very good movie. I can relate to it relatively well; it's the kind of thing many of us in modern America deal with, even if we don't deal with those specific situations. But whatever we're facing here, now, it's nothing compared to what those poor people in Warsaw were facing. A movie like the Pianist really puts that in perspective.