The Pianist Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)January 21st, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE PIANIST
Directed by Roman Polanski
Rated R, 148 minutes
**** (out of 5)
As a little boy, Roman Polanski was pushed through a hole in a barbed wire fence by his father to escape the Kraków ghetto, and became one of the improbable few survivors of the Holocaust. In "The Pianist", he tells the story of another artist who survived, Polish composer and pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody). It is a timely return to form for the iconic director, most of whose landmark movies were made before he fled the U.S. under threat of a morals charge in 1977.
"The Pianist" is a harrowing story, unrelieved by distractions of humor, romance, or personal relationships as it sinks deeper and deeper into the nightmare of the Jewish experience in Nazi occupied Poland during WWII. Working from Szpilman's memoir, published shortly after the war ended, Polanski and screenwriter Ronald Harwood assemble piece by piece the indignities and atrocities suffered by the Warsaw Jews, building the grim picture like the bricks in the wall that sealed off the ghetto from the rest of the city.
Szpilman, in his late twenties when the war started, was a celebrated virtuoso in Warsaw, the aesthete son of a family of intellectual upper middle class Jews. In the opening scene he is performing in a broadcast studio at Radio Poland when the city is bombed. Szpilman continues playing as the building is rocked with explosions; only when the studio itself is blown apart does he abandon the piano and make his way out, brushing plaster from his sleeve and smoothing his ruffled hair. It is not, we suspect, heroism that kept him at the keyboard, but rather an inability to comprehend the situation or think of anything else to do.
There is nothing of the rebel about Szpilman, and little of the hero. As the Nazi noose tightens, he tries to float above it. Cafés will not serve Jews, public parks are closed to Jews, all right; he sighs, manages a weary smile. The French and the British have joined the war. Things are bound to get better. But they don't, they get worse.
He lives his life around and above the restrictions. But soon there is no room around and above. Warsaw's Jews are forced out of their homes and into the ghetto. When his father doesn't bow to a couple of German soldiers on the street, they club him and push him into the gutter. There is no food, no work for Jews. Szpilman finds a job playing cocktail piano at a Jewish collaborationist café. Things are bound to get better. But they don't, they get worse.
Jews are humiliated, beaten, shot on the streets. The trains come, and Warsaw's Jews are herded onto them, bound for Treblinka. Nobody knows for sure what happens there, but word is that the camp gets trainloads of Jews, but no trainloads of food. A few individuals begin to mutter about resistance, but not Szpilman. His family is taken on the freight cars. He is pushed away by a friend in the Ordnungsdeinst, the collaborationist Jewish police. He escapes the ghetto, and is hidden in an apartment by Polish friends in the Resistance. Things are bound to get better. But they get worse.
He watches from a series of hiding places overlooking the ghetto as the uprising occurs and the rebels are slaughtered. He sees everything from a safe, or relatively safe, remove, but as the city is blown to pieces and things fall unspeakably apart he sinks further and further into the black hole of despair and extremity.
Two things happen to rescue him. He is discovered by a German officer. But the officer is a music lover, and provides him with food and warm clothing. And then the war ends.
Polanski has done a brilliant job of assembling a mosaic of detail, and bringing home to us the inconceivable horrors of what went on in Warsaw. And Adrien Brody, a tall gangly heron whose weight reportedly dropped below 100 pounds at one point during the shooting, is extraordinary as the artistic dandy who gradually sheds everything of himself until a body barely covered with flesh and rags and encasing a barely flickering will to survive is all that remains.
There is a cinematic problem in an audience's identifying with a hero who does not play the part of a hero, and there is a structural problem in the latter part of this story that centers on a passive figure watching from a series of similar perspectives as the action takes place at a distance. But the power of Polanski, Brody, and Szpilman's unspeakable experience rides over these barriers, and what emerges is a testament to the strongest muscle in the human body, the spirit. Movie, director, screenplay, and actor were honored as the year's best by the National Society of Film Critics.
"What will you do," the music-loving German officer asks, "when all this is over?" "I'll play the piano on Polish radio," the bearded scarecrow mumbles. In a coda, Polanski places him back in the studio at the piano, almost as if nothing had happened. But it has happened, and it's hard to believe that Szpilman, who died two years ago, slept many peaceful nights over the ensuing fifty years.
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