Polanski's best

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 2003)

Roman Polanski's The Pianist, one of the best films of 2002, has a singular, almost claustrophobic view of the Holocaust in Poland. Where Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List was notable for its scope, its expansiveness, The Pianist views every atrocity through the eyes of one man, the celebrated Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose memoir provided the material for the film. What he sees, and what he becomes during the Nazi occupation of Poland, is at the heart of this inward-looking classic.
The film begins in 1939, while Szpilman is playing a polonaise -- the most Polish of musical compositions -- for Polish radio. German bombs begin to explode outside the studio; a final one literally blows Szpilman off of his piano bench. His primary reaction to the interruption of his playing is annoyance: like his fellow Jews in Warsaw, he has no idea of the horrors to come.
The horrors that do come, come slowly. First, Jews are banished from upscale eating establishments and city parks; then they are required to wear an insignia of the Star of David, identifying them immediately. For Szpilman, however, protected by his fame as a musician, these progressively demeaning acts have little significance: like the bombs near the radio station they are annoyances, indignities that can be tolerated.
It's difficult to imagine how they could be brushed aside so easily, but we are reminded that they are imposed over a period of time. With time as a shield it's possible to live in denial, casting a blind eye to the growing dehumanizing of the Jews, as well as Gypsies and other "undesirables."
Finally, however, there can be no more possibility of denial. The Warsaw ghetto is constructed, and it is gradually populated by all the Jews in the city, packed together in subhuman conditions. Not long afterward, the undesirables begin to be taken to the trains leading to the death camps.
Up to this point, Szpilman has been hardly more than a casual onlooker, but it becomes clear that his celebrity will no longer protect him or his family. Having disdained the offer to become a Jewish collaborator, he is pulled back from a train leading to Treblinka by a collaborator who admires his music. The rest of his family go to the camp, where they all die.
From this time, Szpilman lives through the war in solitude, shuffled from safe house to safe house thanks to the desperate heroics of the Polish Underground: once again, his musical genius has saved him where so many perished. The austerity of his life is heartbreaking. He can only watch through a window as the vainglorious Warsaw ghetto uprising occurs and is brutally put down. One of his safe houses is directly across the street from a Warsaw hospital that has been commandeered by the Germans; watching the hospital through a window, he learns that the war on the Russian front is going from bad to worse.
Although the physical aspects of his life hardly change from day to day, routinely tedious and necessarily silent, Szpilman's inner life undergoes a metamorphosis. At the beginning of the movie we see him sporting the cool arrogance of his social stature. As time passes, he is turned almost solipsistically inward, finally becoming little more than a passive observer, who allows the circumstances of his world to enter in, but has gradually lost the capability to project himself outward. He has seen too much; he has heard far too little, especially of his beloved music.
Szpilman's transition requires the most deftly understated of acting performances, and Brody delivers an unbelievably touching portrait of a man regressing from an upper-crust social existence to a life parceled out in the tiniest of morsels -- not only of food, but of human companionship. Polanski's deliberately narrow vision is the perfect vehicle for viewing this life: there's no artifice, and there's nothing remotely hinting at melodrama. The Germans go about their business of execution and capricious slaughter coldly and efficiently: in one scene a group of German soldiers make their Jewish prisoners dance to their bullets; in another, the soldiers drop a wheelchair-bound man from an upstairs balcony before marching the remaining Jews in the room downstairs to be shot. Polanski depicts the horrors with a cold eye: a Holocaust survivor himself, he is painfully aware that the Holocaust had very few heroes, and most often survival was the best that could be hoped for.
The film's defining moment occurs with the Russians at the gates of Warsaw. Szpilman, foraging for food in a bombed-out town house, encounters a German captain (Thomas Kretschmann). Fortuitously, there is a piano in the house. When the captain asks Szpilman what he is doing, he replies that he is a musician. "Play something," the captain orders. Szpilman does, beautifully as ever. The captain is moved, offers his overcoat, and returns more than once with food.
It's difficult to adequately explain the subtlety and the power of this scene. It captures not only the arbitrariness of Szpilman's existence, but also the moral ambivalence of the Holocaust itself. Once again, Szpilman's musical talent has saved him. His survival is a matter of luck rather than heroism. We see as he is playing that he is literally playing for his life, and it is only his good fortune to have been discovered by a music lover who appreciates his talent.
On a higher level, the concert is a morality play whose subject is how the sentimental, music-loving Germans could have perpetrated such horrors as Szpilman has witnessed during his years in hiding. There is no excusing their evils, only wonderment at how it all could have happened in the first place. To Polanski's credit he doesn't offer an answer to this vexing question. Very likely, like almost all of us he has none.
This doesn't mean that he doesn't make the effort: this is a brutal film, whose imagery shows with a grim meticulousness how cruelly human beings can treat other human beings. But it is also a film about hope, and about the almost-inexhaustible tenacity of the human spirit. Wladyslaw Szpilman came as close to being broken as it is possible to be, yet he survived, not with flourishes or heroics, but with a simple, amazing resilience of will. This is certainly one lesson about the Holocaust that needs to be remembered.