I think we’re talking past each other here. First, being armed and wearing a uniform doesn’t make someone a caricature of evil by any stretch of the imagination. You can depict someone carrying out evil policies (ie, shouting “JUDEN VERBOTEN!”) without resorting to caricature, too.
If you can’t recognize Fienne’s performance as Goeth as telegraphic, I can’t help you. It had two notes, a twitchy psychotic routine that looked like a lampoon of Peter Lorre, and a ridiculously overstated cold dispassion that bordered on robotic. That in itself was cartoonish, but not enough for Spielberg. No, he had to use directed lighting effects to highlight Goeth’s Rasputin-like gaze in every other scene, and any number of other melodramatic devices.
Yes there is: realistically. When you translate everything into movie shorthand, that’s when you minimize the horrors of the Third Reich. When you use the same techniques and cues that tell the audience that “The Empire” is bad, and “The Rebels” are good, you reduce history (and the personal horrors of millions) to something rather thin.
One of the most effective shots in The Pianist shows an old man dancing for a couple of Nazi soldiers in Warsaw ghetto. It has the frankness of an anecdote, and the banal (almost documentary) realism of it is what makes it so profounding horrifying and heartbreaking. The old man’s desperation is palpable. The soldiers are clearly having a good time. They are enjoying a moment of amusement and relaxation. Just an ordinary break from their routine. They are not shown as leering sadists. They’re just… soldiers. Their pleasure is as ordinary as yours or mine. Whatever defect of character allows them to be so free and easy, so light-hearted, when they are in the middle of (and actively participating in the creation of) such an incomprehensible amount of totally senseless human suffering, is a mystery. Whatever their fault was, it was so commonplace that most German citizens weren’t even capable of recognizing it. It may be comforting to say “The Nazis were inhuman,” but we mustn’t ever forget that, on an individual level, Nazis were ordinary human beings, who somehow went along with something so unspeakably inhuman that it’s hard to examine it closely without becoming physically ill. How is this possible? Could something similar happen again? The realistically depicted Nazis in The Pianist are far more horrifying than Spielberg’s cartoon Nazis, because they don’t seem so unlikely. There’s no insulating feeling that it all happened long ago and far away. The people on both sides are real people, just like us.
Germany didn’t just spawn a generation of monsters. There wasn’t something in the water that bred sociopaths. Nationalism and xenophobia somehow got so far out of hand that something unspeakable happened, and the people responsible for carrying it out regarded it as perfectly rational.
It really is important to remember that the most evil person you’ll ever meet isn’t necessarily going to come across with a Freddy Kreuger vibe. When a movie has pretensions to be a historical document (Spielberg has made free copies of the film available to every high school in the U.S., right?) then it’s downright irresponsible to simplify things to the point of White Hats and Black Hats. This is why Schindler’s List is a good popcorn flick but not much more.
No argument, the Third Reich is the most outstanding example of capital E Evil in modern history. If the lesson we learn from it is that groups of people who do evil do it because they are fundamentally inhuman, and recognizable as such at twenty paces, then we’re looking in the wrong lesson book. Big time.
