Roman Polanski Renders 'The Pianist' Like A Melancholy Poetry!

Rating: 9/10 (24 August 2015)

Truth can be and often is stranger than fiction and so it is with the true story of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who through sheer nerve and luck managed to escape the clutches of the uber-efficient Nazi death machine.
Szpilman before the war was a nationally renowned musician. At the start of the film, he's playing Chopin on Polish radio just as World War II begins and bombs drop all around the radio studio, knocking it off the air, and knocking Szpilman's life into a downward spiral. Little by little, Szpilman and his family are subjected to the Nazi process of separating the Jewish population of Warsaw from the rest of the inhabitants. Starting with restaurants and parks being closed to them, they are forced from upper middle-class security into life in the arm-banded ghetto to their final journey on the train where they herded as less compromising compatriots into the rolling pens of death. Just when the audience is on the verge of becoming numbed by the grim life in the ghetto, the pianist, through quirks of fate, is spared the death camps, only to go into hiding in abandoned apartments, trusting sympathetic Poles to protect him in a world where an act of kindness can be a death sentence. Szpilman becomes a voyeur to the horror he witnesses through windows and half-closed doors that lead to a world that has become a death trap. Battles rage, Nazis march, and civilians are mowed down as he watches helplessly. Just when the Nazi brutality against the Jews seems unbearable, a music-loving German soldier treats the pianist kindly while Jewish victims prey on each other.
The Pianist is rendered with a melancholy poetry by Roman Polanski. His depiction of life in the Warsaw Ghetto is a series of disturbing images framed with a sense of urgency. However, these images don't need any melodramatic embellishment. And in this way, Polanski ensures he is not cheapening the story by appealing to our pity. What he has this film ask of us is to bear witness that such things happened in a civilized place, to never forget that they can and do happen still. And yet amid the usual roster of sadism, there are notes of unexpected poignancy that tug at your heart strings. The scene where Szpilman climbs over the wall and is walking through a veritable waste land of destroyed buildings is a powerfully quiet, cold image of death.
The muted heroism of Szpilman's survival flashes as a fragile and determined pulse in Adrien Brody's magnificently understated performance. As Szpilman, he brilliantly echoes the film's tone of stunned disbelief, as a series of events transforms him from an elegantly dressed, highly cultured musician to a scavenging, debased shell of a human being. His performance is a marvel of wary tenacity and unquenchable humanity.
The Pianist is an emotionally devastating film that will linger in the minds of all who experience it; the notion that war is the absence of art in our dealings with one another will remain as timeless as a well-written phrase.