An honest and powerful film

Rating: Null/10 (24 February 2003)

The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski, is the story of Polish-Jewish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman who lived in hiding for two and a half years during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Both Polanski and Szpilman shared a similar experience in the war and both survived to enrich the world with the power of their art. Adapted by the playwright Ronald Harwood (The Dresser) from Szpilman's memoirs, the film is a powerful indictment of the horrors of the Holocaust told through the perspective of a lone survivor, one of only 200 of Warsaw's 400,000 Jews. Working as a radio pianist in Warsaw, Poland at the time of the Nazi invasion in 1939, Szpilman and his family were rounded up and "relocated" to an area of Warsaw set aside for Jews. The step-by-step brutalization of Warsaw's Jews is devastatingly recorded by Polanski's camera --from having to wear identifying armbands to being banned from parks and public benches. As played by the brilliant Adrien Brody, Szpilman's demeanor slowly changes during the course of the film from cockiness to growing desperation.
When Szpilman's family is herded onto a train en route to certain death at Treblinka, he is pulled aside by a Polish policeman he knew and sent back to labor detail in the ghetto. After being promised assistance from the underground, he escapes and spends the rest of the war on the run, going from one safe house to another. When help is no longer forthcoming, he has to hide in the attic of a bombed out building, struggling to elude capture and to find scraps of food to survive. The Pianist is strongest in depicting the horrors of daily life in Warsaw during the war and there are truly shocking moments. Polanski does not flinch from showing us children shot in the streets, an elderly man thrown to his death in his wheelchair, and a young boy crawling under a stone wall, getting half way through, then grabbed from the other side and beaten to death.
This is a film whose images will remain etched in your memory. Thomas P. Muhl, who underwent a similar experience in Budapest, attests to the film's eerie authenticity in his memoir Retouching Stalin's Moustache, (Xlibris Publishing)*. He recalls "the hiding in abandoned apartments and being spooked by objects the people had left behind like unfinished cups of coffee, scarfes, and toys. Looking out the windows of these places, feeling trapped and seeing the poor people being hauled away from across the street, wondering when my turn will come. Sneaking around at nights in other apartments during an air raid, looking for food and being afraid that one of the neighbors would rat on me. The sense of total devastation around me, ruins and corpses."
The Pianist is an honest film that refuses to trade on sentimentality to achieve its power. Szpilman's reluctance to let us in on his thoughts about his family, friends, and the people who helped keep him alive make him appear aloof, but the reality is so far beyond normal comprehension that emotional numbness may be the only appropriate response. When Brody finds a kindred soul in the German Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann) who discovers his hiding place, however, we are finally drawn into the humanity of his character. It is here that the soulful music of Chopin's Nocturne in C played by Szpilman in a hollowed-out apartment in the midst of desolation lends a bizarre beauty to the unfathomable night.