the best film about the Holocaust

Rating: 10/10 (4 February 2004)

*contains some spoilers* Roman Polanski's The Pianist is an experience in taut restraint, both in acting and direction. It is also Polanski's most personal film and the only one based on a true story. The title refers to Wladyslaw Szpilman (upon whose memoirs the film is based), a young Polish Jew living in Warsaw at the time of the Nazi invasion in 1939. He is a pianist by profession and nature, which the film and book make abundantly clear. Polanski's film, primarily due to its cautious and intelligent restraint, achieves a haunting resonance and brutal realism, but most importantly, through the story of Szpilman, it captures the horrors of the Jewish experience during WWII. Indeed, Polanski tells Szpilman's story true to its source, without moralizing, histrionics, and glorifying certain characters while vilifying others.
The Pianist opens with images of Warsaw just months before the war, yet within a minute Szpilman is playing the piano on the Polish Radio, bombs exploding in the distant outside. However, a few seconds later the distant outside becomes the terrifying close inside and debris starts falling on Szpilman's piano. Soon, despite the hopes and self-assurances of his family the war does not stop with British or French support - the Nazis march inside the city and Warsaw Jews find themselves wearing distinguishing armbands with the Star of David on them. Szpilman and his family, with the notable exception of his brother, watch the institution of new rules and regulations unfold with curious hope and acceptance. In that sense, The Pianist resembles many of Polanski's other films. Like in Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant, or Chinatown the main characters suddenly experience a change of reality within which they exist. They plunge into it since they are unable to counter it, or even understand it. Consequently, when Szpilman's family is sent to a concentration camp and he manages to escape, his experiences inside and outside the Warsaw ghetto are marked by a certain stoicism.
However, Polanski cannot be faulted for the emotional restraint of his main character, perfectly performed by Adrien Brody. Brody's bare performance sheds light on Szpilman's focus on the most basic survival, revealing to us the true horrors of the Holocaust. Szpilman's lack of sentiment, for which Polanski has been criticized, reflects the dehumanization under Nazi occupation. Human beings are reduced to simple hunter-gatherers, they are concerned with making it through the day without dying. Furthermore, whatever rationality, discussion and outrage exist in the movie, they occur in the beginning before the Nazi horrors actually begin. When violence, random shootings, and executions become part of the reality of Warsaw ghetto residents, no emotion seems strong enough a reaction. There is a scene in the movie where a German commander stops a group of Jews going to work, Szpilman among them, and asks several at random to lie down. He shots them all in the head except for the last one - his magazine is empty. The scene is reminiscent of a scene in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, in which a German soldier attempts the same, but his gun locks on him. After several tries he gives up and lets the victim live. Polanski's soldier reloads the gun and shoots the man. The camera observes these terrifying events unflinchingly, detached from them. Yet this detachment is a virtue - it adds to the horrifying, merciless realism of Polanski's film. I admire this detachment precisely because it would have been very easy to introduce notions of vengeance into the movie, to stereotype, or surrender to sentimental and false heroism. Yet that would have undermined the portrayal of the Holocaust experience, where not all Germans were evil, not all Jews were good, and the moral rules by which we live were shattered.
The film's most crucial scene occurs when Szpilman encounters a Nazi officer who eventually saves him from death. Devoid of sentimentality, beautifully directed, it is simply a montage of shots of Szpilman playing Chopin on the piano and the officer watching. Yet it also a scene that makes explicit what is so attractive to Polanski about Szpilman's story. The German officer is not an enemy here, an amoral brute, but a human being, who, by circumstance, is in the position to save or kill Szpilman, who, by circumstance, is completely helpless. This element of fate is crucial to The Pianist - Polanski's Holocaust is an irrational, fated event. Polanski underlines that Szpilman survives by mere accident, just like others die by chance. In that accident lies the horror of the Holocaust - in fate's indiscriminate brutality.
Some critics have stated that Polanski's film tells a story atypical to the Jewish experience, precisely because Szpilman survives, whereas most Jews were exterminated. Though it may be atypical of him to survive, the randomness with which he does speaks of the arbitrariness (and consequently meaninglessness) of those who perished. The restraint with which Polanski approaches the adaptation of Szpilman's The Pianist pervades the entire film, resulting in a mercilessly terrifying, real and unsentimental picture of the Nazi horrors. The film is unflinching, honest and it does not settle for easy answers - rather, it shows us a true story without judging any of the characters or the situation within which they coexist. It simply unfolds and in its simplicity lies its impact.