The Pianist: It's about survival

http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives20031109.shtml#59629

Columnist Jan Herman, one of my friend Shane's favorite columnists from way back, has a big problem with Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning film The Pianist. Basically, the film forgets about Wladyslaw Szpilman's family immediately after they are carted off to the camps, while it lionizes the SS officer played by Thomas Kretschmann, who could have killed him but didn't.

What Herman pointed out is true, but it didn't bother me a bit. In fact, I think that was the whole point of the film. It didn't make the main character into a hero, just a survivor. It dealt with the people who had a direct impact on his survival. His family was forgotten because, my guess is, he forgot about them, except maybe in the abstract, because job #1 was staying alive. The German soldier (whose "heroizing" was historical, not invented, so I don't get Herman's complaint about it) had the final and ultimate impact on the main character's survival: he could have shot him, but he didn't. To the main character and thus from the viewpoint of the movie, he was a big hero. I guess they could have included what happened to the family in the scroll at the end, but we already knew what happened to them: they died in the camps. The scroll was for characters whose fates weren't obvious from watching the movie.

Here's my original review of the movie: http://www.geocities.com/evil_spoon/p2002pianist.htm.

Thanks to Shane for the link.