Adrian Brody's brilliant performance and Roman Polanski's direction help makes this a masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (8 July 2003)

The year was 2003 when I fell in love with the Academy Award movies in which instead of watching mindless movies from XXX with Vin Diseal or The Scorpion King with The Rock, I started watching movies that were nominated for Academy Awards no matter what the award was. 2002 was a year of memorable movies from Chicago and it's razzle dazzle to Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York showing how violent America was during the early years of the mafia. But no movie has touched me more deeply and profound than Roman Polanski's look at the holocaust in "The Pianist" in which the director himself was a victim of the tragic event before escaping into hiding.
Adrian Brody plays real life pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman who is force to move out of the apartment complexes with his family and into a small community after Hitler announces that certain parts of the country will be divided for those who are Jewish and those who are not. Wladyslaw and his family see the horrors that go on from soldiers forcing people to dance in the streets, homeless Jews fighting people for food; even at night when Nazi soldiers break into people's houses to execute Jews for no apparent reason. The scenes are so real that I gasped at first sight.
After Wladyslaw and his family are moved into concentration camps to work in enslavement, he leaves where he's like a mouse hiding from building to building in avoiding the cats to get him. Years go by for the famous pianist in which the horrors are continuing in the streets for which there are a few people not afraid to die trying in the fight.
The film is mainly a survival for the pianist, but the film's portrayal of what went on outside the concentration camps during the holocaust is a masterpiece that only Roman Polanski never thought he could show. Adrian Brody's performance is so wonderful that you'll be shaken by his performance; Thomas Kratchsmann as a sympathetic German Nazi soldier to Wladyslaw is another good portrayal in the film that shows how good acting can be when putting a survivalist and a soldier meeting face to face.