A spectacular film, fully deserving to win Best Picture

Rating: Null/10 (19 February 2003)

Roman Polanski has tackled the subject which stole his innocence and haunted the rest of his life. The nearly 70-year-old filmmaker (responsible for indelible classics "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby") has filmed the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman. And what a story it is. Szpilman was a middle-class Jewish pianist whose comfortable life in Warsaw was interrupted, and then changed forever, by the German occupation of the Polish city and the subsequent persecution and murder of the Jews. It is easy to forget how absurd the Final Solution must have seemed to people in 1939, and one can understand how the Szpilmans, well-educated and financially secure Jews could not realize just how much trouble they were in until it was too late. Polanski captures the brutal and spontaneous violence of the Germans with unblinking, horrifying honesty that chills in a different (and some would say, more genuine) manner than Spielberg's in-your-face hand-held camera approach in "Schindler's List." It is inevitable that any Holocaust film will draw comparisons to Steven Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece which defined the genre (as crass as it might seem to refer to Holocaust films as a "genre"). It must be said that "The Pianist" is a different type of film, one which is concerned with one man's struggle to survive. Like "Schindler's List," this film deals with gentiles helping Jews (although that is not the primary focus of the movie) but unlike "Schindler's List," "The Pianist" shows it from the Jewish perspective. Also unlike that earlier film, Polanski does not go for the black-and-white cinema verite realism of "Schindler's List" and "The Pianist" is all the more affective for it; that style might not have suited this movie as well. With color cinematography, he is able to highlight the contrast between the ghetto and the outside world which, however miserable cannot compare to the suffering of the Jews. And because the camerawork is so subtle, we are slowly immersed in the film to the point where it takes on a spooky sense of surrealism and we are as shocked as the protagonist to see the grim, jagged skyline of Warsaw after bombing, the indescribable brutality visited on random Jews, and the unfolding of events outside the main character's window. The film diverges from most Holocaust films when (do not read if you don't want to know what happens in the second half of the film) Szpilman is pulled from the line of Jews entering the boxcars; instead of taking us to the death camps, the film pulls in the opposite direction, out of the ghetto and into hidden apartments where we see occupied Poland and the uprisings that challenge the occupiers. There is a fascinating bit at the end with a (seemingly) conscience-stricken German officer who listens to Szpilman's piano-playing and protects him in the last days before the Soviets capture the city. All in all, an absolutely stunning film, and one well worth your time. See it as soon as possible.