The Pianist Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)December 20th, 2002
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The Pianist is the first film director Roman Polanski has made in Poland since his very first feature (Knife in the Water). It's also, according to the press notes, the film he's waited his entire career to make. It's too bad he waited so long because if Polanski had made The Pianist a little earlier into his career, it would have been that much more devastating to watch. I don't know if it's me or what, but it's getting to the point where I've become almost desensitized from watching so many movies about World War II and Nazis and Jews and Hitler and the Holocaust and concentration camps and genocide. And I'm sure that's the opposite intention of any filmmaker who attempts to tackle a picture about the topics listed above.
Because The Pianist won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, I was anticipating something earth-shattering, so perhaps my expectations were a little high. It's still a good film, but it doesn't really offer anything we haven't seen before. Had The Pianist been the first film about somebody going through hell trying to survive the Nazi Experience, I would expect people to be falling all over the film. But it's, like, the 96th. I wanted to love it, but I just couldn't. Does that make me a heel? Anyway, enough about me.
The Pianist opens in a 1939 Warsaw radio station, where popular pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody, Harrison's Flowers) is performing Chopin live on the air...until German bombs blow the place apart. Wladyslaw runs home to his family, who are about to hightail it out of the city when the radio announces England and France have just declared war on the Germans. Thinking things might take a turn for the better, the Szpilmans decide to stick around and begin to busy themselves with finding a hiding spot for their excess money, since the Germans only allowed them to keep $2,000 per family.
Of course, that's just the beginning of the humiliation and atrocities suffered by the Szpilmans and the rest of the Jews in Poland. Then park benches and certain stores became off-limits. Then they were forced to break out the Star of David badges. Then, in October 1940, the family was forced to move into the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, where more bad stuff happened, followed by worse stuff, followed by a forced train ride into the country. Wladyslaw managed to escape from the people lined up for the free trip to Treblinka (but not before uttering one of the most memorable lines of the year to his sister - "I wish I knew you better") and spends the rest of the film scampering from hiding spot to hiding spot as he watches his city collapse from the window.
Wladyslaw's isolation is the only thing that really separates The Pianist from the scores of other films with similar content. In a way, it makes the last half of the film a lot like Cast Away, and Brody's performance is - thank God - strong enough to carry the film in a manner similar to Tom Hanks in that film. In one torturous scene, Wladyslaw is put up in a room that also houses a piano, but he can't play it because nobody is supposed to know he's there. The Pianist's decision to use ambient noise instead of a typical score helps drive home the banality of his isolation. Other strong positives include cinematographer Pawel Edelman slowly leaching the film of all its color, and the wildly incredible sets and production design, some of which are done on an impossibly grand scale.
But there's still a few negatives. For some reason, the Poles speak English, even though the Germans speak German. There's a scene toward the end where an increasingly decrepit Wladyslaw plays Chopin for a special guest, but somehow manages to remedy both his permanently slouched posture and his gnarled fingers to do so. And, worst of all, the happy, uplifting ending brings to mind The Sum of All Fears, which used a similar approach even though its body count was somewhere in the millions.
Maybe the Cannes jury ate up The Pianist because it was a true story (Wladyslaw, who died in 2000, penned his autobiography shortly after the war). Maybe it will be this year's version of A Beautiful Mind, which I liked about as much as I did this film. Both are flawed in very different ways and both have very strong lead performances. But neither come close to being the best of the year.
2:28 - R for violence and brief strong language
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