An unforgettable story of humanity and survival.

Rating: 10/10 (2 May 2003)

I sometimes look at what are the essential elements of evaluation of a film, and wonder whether the finer debatable points of cinematographical art can be totally divorced from the overall impact that the movie has on the viewer. "The Pianist" had such a massive impact on me that I could not score it at anything less than 10/10, and view with some bemusement the comments of the "spoilers", wondering whether they watched the same version as I did. OK, we don't all have to agree to agree, but who are these people who are so absorbed in dissecting the minutiae of the `art' that they don't actually take in what is before their eyes.
Now, I confess to some bias. I am the son of a holocaust survivor, who himself narrowly avoided boarding the train to a death camp. He is now 85, and I hope he may live to 100 and beyond, but as the generation who can remember those horrors is rapidly passing from us, we are increasingly aware of the global growth of the holocaust denial industry and its exploitation of both the dwindling number of surviving eye-witnesses and the apparently growing number of people so obsessed with their lives of 21st century consumerism that they simply don't want to know. So I consider we are fully justified in the assertion that anyone bleating out "not another holocaust movie" is lending support to that vile camp. It's a story that needs telling and re-telling over and over again. Let it never be forgotten by any future generation.
And an eye-witness account is precisely what "The Pianist" is. Wladyslaw Szpilman wrote his memoir "Death of a City" back in 1946 while it was all fresh in his mind, and the view we had was every bit as fresh and therefore as mind-numbing in its horror as if we were living through it ourselves. That is the director's art. That is the actor's skill. That is why they both received well-deserved Oscars. Szpilman didn't view himself as a hero, and Brody portrayed with great finesse his guilt at not being there across the wall in the uprising. There have been plenty of great movies portraying that event from inside the wall, but Szpilman was outside, and we saw his agonising difficulty in coming to terms with his survival when all around him was cruel and pointless death. His reaction to the incident when a number of his group of workers were randomly called out of line and cold-bloodedly murdered (let's not use the word "executed", which conveys some notion of legitimacy to the act) is reminiscent of that of Pierre Bezukhov in "War and Peace" when he is spared the firing squad simply because when it came to his turn in line the French officer had just got too bored with summary "executions" of "incendiaries" amongst the Russian civilians.
I haven't read Szpilman's book, but I am assuming the movie remains true to his account of events. So if people sitting in comfortable 21st century cinemas find it lacks action, or fails to cater to their minimal attention span, being slow and long, well that's tough, because that's how it was. Look at this comment "the length and editing of this movie made me feel as if I'd actually been living for five years during WWII". Yes, you got it, mate! A long slow occupation during a long slow war. A long time to sit it out and try and survive. A long time to focus on getting through each day with the sole goal of miraculously finding yourself alive at the end of it.
One of the detractors even hit upon this to rubbish it "All Germans speak GermanÂ… and all Jews speak English." Oh, this guy is so sharp! He's failed to pick the obvious code that when people were supposedly speaking Polish, they delivered their lines in English, for the obvious benefit of an Anglophone audience, and whenever German was being spoken, that was what we heard. So whenever the Poles were coping with a foreign language, so were we English speakers, but at least we had the benefit of subtitles. OK, so this commentator is a German thinking the movie is terribly unfair to his nation. Well, sorry pal, your folk weren't all entirely nice sweet boys during the first half of last century, so please try and get your mind round that idea and you might ultimately benefit from it!
The Warsaw ghetto was possibly the most controlled exercise ever in the extermination of a population, but as the Polish people soon found to their great cost, as Slavs they too were considered "Untermenschen" and they were just the next in line after the Jews, with the destruction of their city in the creation of eastern European "Lebensraum" for the Aryan master race being all part of the plan. We saw their partisans being cut down too by bullets, and the woman shot in the back who curled up in death into a kneeling position almost of prayer became a strong visual icon in the latter phase of the film. So it ain't just about Jews. It's about one man's agonising journey of survival against all the odds. Not a man who sets himself out as great or special in any way beyond his outstanding musical talent. Just a human being. That's it.
I repeat, 10/10, an unforgettable experience.