Great start, slow pacing middle, triumphant end

Rating: 7/10 (15 February 2003)

One of the best picture nominees this year about the true life of a Jewish Polish concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, who somehow in the madness of W.W.II managed to elude the death camps. Yes it is a holocaust film, albeit it does not take place there, but in the ghettos of Warsaw where over 300,000 jews were rounded up and confined to live in a small segregated area of the city in absolute squalor. I've always said that good films are never depressing, but this one does get there. And how can it not sometimes. Towards the middle of the film when the audience is aware of the impending doom, the characters still cling on to hope of radio contacts that the allies are coming to save them (not knowing of course they will fail), and the idea that all the moving is temporary.. This is the only slow part of the film, and we're stuck in some powerful yet obligatory scenes, soldiers whipping and torturing jews, starvation, plagues, death marches, random on the spot executions, jews turning on each other in the ghetto just to survive, some pretty hellish stuff. But Polanski manages to bring together a great cast (nazis and jews alike both good and bad) that bring the film to its peak as Szpilman at one point manages to escape and live with the resistance who will protect him. But life is not easy, and a crushingly good scene involves Szpliman hiding out in an apartment by himself, running out of food and then we watch helplessly as he breaks several dishes accidentally while rummaging through the cupboards and gives himself away to his German neighbors.
Thinking of how it must have been to live in that era and not be found out, must have been just pure hell. And it is when these moments when we know that just the slightest exposure of Szpilman's talents and presence will get him killed in an instant, that the film exceeds tremendously. While the middle slows down, the last 1/2 hour is a cinematic triumph and for the most part turns the murderous German forces on its head (I won't give the scenes away). Throw in a cinematographic great look at bombed out Warsaw, and you have some more to entertain you.
Remember... War is madness..
Pretty good film
Rating 7 out of 10