The Holocaust without tears

Rating: Null/10 (8 May 2003)

Director Roman Polanski's The Pianist is based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's account of his survival during the Nazi Holocaust in Poland. A Jew, Szpilman was a noted pianist for Warsaw radio in 1939 when Hitler's troops occupied his country. We watch Szpilman's family wear Star of David armbands identifying them as Jews, then suffer starvation and brutality in the Warsaw ghetto. His parents and sisters climb into boxcars to take them to the Treblinka death camp. He escapes; they don't. Whether his survival means anything is a question this powerful and austere film is too intelligent to answer.
The Pianist is a personal film for Polanski, whose mother was killed in a death camp, and is the first film shot in his native Poland since his breakout international hit Knife in the Water in 1962. That success led to Hollywood triumphs with Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), films darkened by a sense of evil that, after watching The Pianist, seems like the shadow of childhood experience. (Personal tragedy further darkened his vision. His wife, actress Sharon Tate, was slain by Charles Manson's `family' in 1969. Eight years later Polanski was convicted on a sex charge and fled to Europe to escape prison.)
Unlike recent Holocaust films, The Pianist never shows what happened in the death camps. Polanski almost ruthlessly limits his camera to what Szpilman saw, relying on the viewer's knowledge for historical context. Brick walls rise around the ghetto, German soldiers randomly shoot Jews in the street, and a few ghetto activists argue for armed resistance against their captors.
But one mark of genius is that Polanski's camera is not entirely subjective. His theme is the mystery and meaning of survival amid genocide. Polanski and writer Ronald Harwood embody this theme in a character that evokes empathy but not sympathy. Szpilman's artistic aloofness, imaged in the first scene when he continues to play Chopin in a radio studio while German shells explode outside, suggests Polanski chose this story because Szpilman witnessed events without participating in them. The meaning of his survival when millions died is thus as inexplicable to Polanski as it is for us.
The Pianist offers few moments of personal drama and no character arc. Szpilman's escape from the ghetto is abetted by a Jewish policeman whose earlier offer to join the goon squad of the Judenrat Szpilman had turned down. Outside the ghetto walls, sympathizers and friends who remember his talent leave him to starve in Warsaw apartments, like everyone else in that embattled city. Long stretches without dialogue follow efforts to find food in broken buildings, culminating in an encounter with a Nazi officer (Thomas Kretschmann) in a scene that is surprising, moving, and ultimately as enigmatic as Szpilman's earlier attempts to escape extermination.
In one scene, a singer he knew in happier days looks out the window of his hiding place at the ruined ghetto, pounded to rubble after the 1943 uprising. When Szpilman hints he should have remained inside, she says the Jewish resistance `died with dignity.' Yes, they did, and the pianist understands this, but false heroics are not a choice in the face of the Nazi killing machine. The Pianist gains power in scenes that reduce words to impossible gestures.
Adrien Brody's lean frame and ethnic face limited him in previous movies to strong character roles. The Pianist calls on his real talent. He keeps the movie moving through long sequences when his character is doing nothing except enduring in silence. In one he uncovers a piano and moves his fingers above the keyboard in a mime of a Chopin nocturne while the music plays in his head. Art can be an escape from horror, but that is not Polanski's point; the horror is always just outside the window or in the next apartment if he is overheard by the Polish woman who, later, shrieks `Jew!' when Szpilman is forced to flee.
His performance helps measure the distance between our engagement with Szpilman and Polanski's assessment of the significance of his main character's survival. Entirely believable in the role and aided by careful casting in minor roles (Maureen Lipman, who plays the mother, looks like she could be Brody's mother), the actor becomes an Everyman who depends on luck, pure and simple, to stay alive until the Russian army triumphs in 1945.
Character is not fate in a world gone mad. Polanski's film escapes the sentimentality of Holocaust films such Schindler's List or Life is Beautiful. Its harsh realism and closely-observed period feel turn us instead to enigmas pondered by the late Italian writer Primo Levi: millions died, some survived, those bear witness, let others extract the meaning if they can.