I recently heard someone say that he didn’t like Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” because the hero just sat around for four years growing a beard and peeling potatoes. Boring.
Aside from the fact that many things of great interest happen in “The Pianist” (including the disastrous Warsaw Uprising), I think this person sounds like he wishes it were more of a Hollywood type action adventure film.
Polanski made a point of not telling an action adventure story.. He was responding to films like “Schindler’s List” which, in his view, propagated the lie that good people were able or willing to heroically oppose the Nazis where they could. I guess he would argue that certainly some remarkable– really remarkable– individuals opposed the Nazis and were active in the underground, but the reality was that these people were very few in number and had no real impact.
A film like “Schindler’s List”, because of it’s focus on a sympathetic hero, Schindler, gives a false impression– that there were substantial forces for good in occupied Europe that made a difference. In reality, even the Warsaw uprising, as magnificent as it was, had no effect on the outcome of the war (at least partly because the Soviets waited outside the city while the Nazi’s repressed the uprising and executed thousands of partisans.)
His “truth”, that he wished to convey in “The Pianist”, was that for most Jews, the reality was that they were swept up by a massive force and that the survival of any of them was more due to fortuitous circumstance and luck than the moral acts of any individual. That’s why Szpilman doesn’t “act”– he reacts, and struggles to survive.
It is also Polanski’s own story– he was separated from his family at the age of 10 and survived by his wits, and good luck. Who are you going to believe? Polanski or Spielberg? I didn’t find it boring at all. I did find “Schindler’s List” offensive because Spielberg had so much contempt for reality that he took an amazing true story and changed it to make it more “Hollywood”– and preposterous. He couldn’t bear to stick to the known facts. He had to clobber you over the head with sentimentality to be sure that you had the “right” feelings about everything. The audience walks out “feeling good about feeling bad”. They liked Schindler. Liking Schindler is a reflection of your good taste. If a party like the Nazis rose up again, they would be sure to choose the right side!
[added January 2011] More importantly, Schindler allows the audience to feel that, had they been in the same situation, they too would have done the right thing. The truth is that millions of people like you and I did nothing, and we are fooling our selves if we think it could never happen here, because there are too many people like us who would resist. We would resist, of course, if the threat were presented to us as Spielberg presents it to us: snarling, distasteful Nazis vs. the elegant, empathetic Schindler. It wouldn’t look like that to us. It would look more like Mitch McConnell.
An insidious little note: the original book “Schindler’s List” was classified by the Library Association as “Fiction”. After Spielberg tied into it, it was re-classified as “Non-Fiction”.
Of what value a heroic tale that isn’t true? Is it “essentially” true? How essential is it, that, in reality, nobody quite understood Mr. Schindler or what his exact attitudes and beliefs were? His own wife thought he was an asshole. Spielberg didn’t know what to do with that information. Yes he did– he created that ridiculous scene at the end with poor Mrs. Schindler having to participate in his consecration by putting a pebble on his gravestone.
I cringed.
He should have shown us that sometimes “assholes” do more good than pious preachers.