Polanski's New Spin on an Old Classic

Rating: 9/10 (4 August 2010)

Before seeing "The Pianist," I thought there couldn't possibly be a movie about the Holocaust that could tell me something I didn't already know, or make me feel an emotion I haven't already felt a hundred times before about the topic. But director Roman Polanski proved me wrong.
There's a scene in "The Pianist" in which Nazis invade a Jewish apartment building and "clean out" its tenants. They pick up an elderly man confined to a wheelchair, carry the chair to the edge of the balcony, and casually tip him over the edge to fall to his death on the pavement below. The moment shocked me in a way that nothing in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" did, I think precisely because, unlike Spielberg, Polanski isn't interested in manipulating his audience into feeling something. The strength of his movies has always been that they unfold with a detached, objective point of view and let audiences draw their own conclusions. The scene described above is so shocking because Polanski does nothing to embellish it and therefore never draws attention to the fact that you're watching a movie.
The rest of the film is like that -- it's harrowing and unpleasant at times, but it also rewards the viewer by saying something about a historical event when I didn't think there was anything left to say.
Grade: A