Pianist hits the right notes for me

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2003)

In May 1991, I was invited to give a lecture in Warsaw and took the opportunity of my time there to visit the wartime locations of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto, the station from which the Jews were deported to the concentration camps and the final assault of the 1943 Jewish Uprising as well as a monument to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. That wet Sunday, I found it all hard to internalise, but now Roman Polanski has directed a compelling film in which all these events and locations are brought to life all too realistically and vividly. Polanski himself was a child in the Krakow ghetto and lost his mother to the camps, so this is an intensely personal and painful work that has taken many decades for him to address on film.
All too easily, films about the Holocaust can overwhelm the senses with the sheer, incomprehensible scale of this modern-day barbarity, but Polanski gives an individual dimension to the account by telling the amazing, but true, story of the famed Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, portrayed brilliantly by relative unknown Adrien Brody. Equally such films frequently present a stereotypical view of good and evil, yet here writer Ronald Harwood manages to depict - sometimes even in the same character - both cruelty and kindness by Jews, gentiles and even Germans. Ultimately what could so easily have been a depressing return to familiar if important territory becomes a work of affirmation and redemption.