Completely Misunderstood

Rating: Null/10 (13 June 2003)

This is NOT a movie about the "Holocaust".
This is not a movie, as Brody has has said, about "The power of Music and survival".
This isn't even a Jewish fairytale of martyrdom or a condemnation of Germans.
This isn't a condemnation of Poles either. (For a group that played such an an importantant part in Mr. Szpillman's story they aren't mentioned in these reviews. The people speaking English were really speaking Polish, whether Jewish or Polish, rather then Russian or German.)
This movie finally put European cruelty in perspective. As a person of European descent you believe that Europe had entirely seperated itself from some sort of ridiculous instinctual behavior. It has been an uninterrupted history of civilization. The only reason this episode of history, and it really is just an episode, happenned is because some sort of abberant thought infected itself into the European political bloodstream. The more likley explanation would be that humanity infected itself into the political mainstream of Europe. Humans are nasty creatures.
This movie in a simple and moving way showed the true nature of man. Who we are doesn't change....from the sack by Crusaders of Constantinople to the sack of Constantinople by the Turks. Somebody is going to sack somebody and and make them pay. Rwanda is horrific only because they had radios and AK-47s. It would have been 100s instead of 100,000s.
Which brings me to this movie. Are there major moral issues that a man survived by luck and connections within the Polish artisan class? Not really. He did what he could do (after doing everything possible for his family). What could he have done during the Jewish uprising except die "in dignity". What could he have done during the Polish uprising except be shot by his ownside as an unrecognized combatant. He could have done either, both honorable (another thankfully worthwhile instinct) but then we wouldn't have his story to illuminate human nature set in 20th Century Europe.

What he did is simply write a book describing his survival and for me thats enough.
One last note for everyone who believes this is an anti-war testimony:
This is a pro-war testimony. Jews weren't being slaughtered because of war but because war wasn't declared soon enough. Violence DOES solve things. We still are, after all, human.