The Pianist
Well, you can have your cartoon Nazis, Roman, goose-stepping out from the frames of The Great Dictator to bash old Jews into the gutter with frying pans; I guess you’re entitled to them. Who’d blame you? And if the weird disconnect between your monstrous 
Germans and your honest Poles sometimes makes it seem like the Stormtroopers from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade have wandered onto the set of Schindler’s List, well, that’s your own lookout. What I don’t think you’re then entitled to do is to turn around and say “Yes, I know, there were some good Germans, oh look, here comes one now!” Because that’s now how the balance of good and evil in the world works, you see. We’re not talking about the Good People versus the Evil People; rather, the Good In People versus the Evil In People.
Because when I watch The Pianist, I find it to be full of what Werner Herzog would call dead images, stale, lifeless, obligatory scenes which fail to bring home the Holocaust to anyone. Cinema has trivialised suffering to the point whereby eliciting an audience reaction is now a tightrope walk with Sentimentality, it is true, and The Pianist does well to eschew this high-wire gamble. But it doesn’t really have anything powerful to offer us in its stead, just cliché and convention. So because the movie doesn’t have anything new to say about the suffering of the Jewish people, I catch myself watching the scenes of women and children being herded onto cattle trucks and asking “Who would allow this? What ordinary human being could have done this for a living, and then went home and had dinner and played with the kids and read the newspaper?” But the movie is not really interested in such questions. No ordinary human beings could have done it. There were no ordinary Nazis. QED.
But there must have been, mustn’t there? What was running through the heads of the German soldiers when they witnessed scenes of heartrending misery a thousand times worse than anything Hollywood has to show us? Fear? Denial? Group hysteria? Was there genuine madness there? I sometimes worry about the way movies like these actually absolve us all of the Holocaust, allowing us to shake our heads in sad wisdom and sob chastely whilst ignoring entirely the fact that these unspeakable horrors where not committed by a bunch of fairy-tale ogres but by us, ordinary people, the rank and file of mankind. The Holocaust was not something the Germans did to the Jews, but something we did to ourselves.
I realise this film is not about the Germans, but it is not about the Jews either. It is not about anything much, so far as I can tell. Adrien Brody’s character survives the war through sitting impassively around and relying on the kindness of strangers. Maybe that’s how it really was, and those who emerged from the Holocaust with their lives were not necessarily the ones with great internal fortitude and guile, but the ones who were impossibly lucky over and over and over again. Probably that’s exactly how it was. But I doubt many of the people who managed to live through that kind of horror were as utterly devoid of mental and personal resource as Brody’s character is here, so completely lifeless and inert that the very fact of his still breathing takes on a kind of bizarre fascination.
And maybe that’s Polanski’s point, that the only way to survive was by being that kind of inactive, impassive, virtual non-entity, creeping below the registers of detectable life, and that any kind of desire to be involved in the business of living was what got people killed. That would be a truly horrific moral choice to make, between Dying and Not Living. I can’t imagine it. But neither, it seems, can The Pianist.