Out of a horrific time, a beautiful work of art

Rating: 9/10 (21 March 2003)

Roman Polanski's The Pianist is without a doubt one of the greatest films ever made about the Holocaust, and easily one of the top five films of the year.
The story is essentially Adrien Brody's quiet, good-natured classical pianist struggling to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. We watch him and his loving family as their hopes for liberation are slowly crushed, and, in an extraordinarily moving sequence, how he is separated from them, their fate left a mystery to him for several years. The rest of the film concerns Brody alternating between hiding and running from the Germans, witnessing pieces of the war, glimpsing and, to an extent, collaborating with the Jewish rebellion in Warsaw. It is a quiet, slow-paced film, often musicless but occassionally accompanied by beautiful classical pieces. Polanski's direction is subtle, disciplined, and impeccably well-timed. Brody's performance is also subtle, and he says very little, but compare his demeanor and facial expressions at the end of the film to how he looks at the beginning, and you see a profound change. Brody strikes all the right notes for this part, delivering a quiet performance of resounding power.
As far as the subject matter, you need to look to Polanski himself to truly understand why this film is significant. There have been several films made about this subject, most notably Spielberg's brilliant Schindler's List, but none quite capture the same tone that this film does. Polanski was himself a Holocaust survivor who survived not unlike Brody's Szpilman. He was not heroic, he did not defy the Nazi regime as Oskar Schindler did, but he hid, viewing the horror from an objective distance and avoiding it at all costs. Spielberg put us in the thick of the horror; Jews were shot and killed right before our eyes, the blood splattered in front of the camera. With Polanski's film we watch the horror unfold at a distance, from fourth story-windows we see tiny Nazi soldiers shooting tiny Jews in the street. There is a realism and urgency to what we are watching because we are seeing it as Polanski and Szpilman did, and we wonder if perhaps one of those soldiers may look up and see us.
The Holocaust was a horrible event most of all, Polanski reminds us, because heroism could not save the majority of Jews. Szpilman could not confront the Nazis head on, or he certainly would have died. Instead he hides in corners, watching and recording the events of a dark time in the world's history. The ultimate catharsis, for Polanski and for the late Szpilman, comes in the final scene, when the pain and suffering of the Holocaust is transformed into beautiful art, and Polanski places us in the audience, close enough to be touched but far enough away to feel as if we're really sitting in the same room. Playing piano was Szpilman's catharsis; filmmaking is Polanski's. The Pianist may not be Polanski's "best" film, but by watching it we see a glimpse of his soul, letting go of the demons left by the Holocaust.