It's a detailed (if extremely unpleasant) first person account of actual events--probably as close as you'll get to what it was actually like to be in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust. It's an amazing survival story, even though the film never pretends for a minute that Szpilman's living was anything other than a fluke. The Holocaust simply can't be sentimentalized, so this movie is a lot more honest to me than Schindler, Anne Frank, and Life is Beautiful, which try to concentrate on the Good in a situation that was essentially as Bad as it ever got. I thought it was really powerful. That's my best defense.
I'm sure you're right. I see what you're saying about the non sentimentality of it, and I agree. Also the fact of his survival being a something of a fluke, as you put it, did work well. I don't know why I had such a negative reaction to it. Or not negative, but I was just expecting some more new ground to broken, given all the noise being made about it.
But that's probably about me more than it is about the movie. Thanks for your viewpoint Tom.
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- tom moody 2-28-2003 11:05 pm
I'm sure you're right. I see what you're saying about the non sentimentality of it, and I agree. Also the fact of his survival being a something of a fluke, as you put it, did work well. I don't know why I had such a negative reaction to it. Or not negative, but I was just expecting some more new ground to broken, given all the noise being made about it.
But that's probably about me more than it is about the movie. Thanks for your viewpoint Tom.
- jim 2-28-2003 11:35 pm [add a comment]