Polanski delivers a personal masterpiece, and a masterpiece that is personal

Rating: 8/10 (26 May 2003)

Disclaimer: Considerable discussion of the plot
There are not many of us who could have our spouse and a number of personal friends visiting murdered by a group of cult members and it not be the biggest personal tragedy of our lives.
Such was the case for Roman Polanski in 1969, when a group of those following cult-leader Charles Manson brutally murdered Polanski's wife Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with the couple's first child, and a number of the couple's friends at Polanski's Hollywood home (Polanski was travelling at the time).
As tragic, and horrific as this was, it followed an even more troubled childhood. Polanski, and his Jewish parents were living in Poland at the outbreak of World War II. He would ultimately separate from his parents as he escaped the Ghetto to seek refuge with Catholic families in the countryside. Meanwhile, his parents transferred to concentration camps where his mother would meet her death in a gas chamber.
After a career of filmmaking that spans nearly fifty years, Polanski has arguably created his best work ever with The Pianist. The film, a true story, begins at the beginning of World War II as Germany has begun bombing Poland, and follows pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, and his quest to survive his persecution as a Jew under Nazi rule.
The film follows as his rights are stripped away from him and his family. First the family loses its sense of security, then their possessions, then they're forced to move to a ghetto where they live in poverty and terror; ultimately his family and friends are shipped off to concentration camps where we all know they will meet their death. Szpilman however manages to find ways to avoid this, first by staying on to perform slave labour in the dismantling of the newly vacated ghetto, and later by going into hiding in the underground supported by a network of Polish nationals. There is nothing heroic about what he does, he just does what he can to survive, and every step of the way there are many who don't survive.
Polanski's direction of the film is excellent, yet subtle to the end. Messages are not spoon fed to the audience. The pace is borderline slow, yet captivating nonetheless. Because Szpilman manages to escape before being sent to a concentration camp, the film ends up being less about the Holocaust, and more about what happened to its victims before the camps.
The Pianist is the first of two films (The Quiet American being the second) I've seen recently that in their timeliness have added texture to how I view the World and how it deals with Iraq. Early in the film, Szpilman's family take consolation in the fact that Britain and France have declared war against Germany in response to its invasion of Poland. They assume that it will be a matter of weeks before they are emancipated from their newly found oppression. I don't want to get particularly political in a movie review, but the film does do an excellent job of portraying just how much damage can be done by a dictator once he gets going, and that while these may end up as faceless newscasts in on our end, there are real victims on the other end that rely on the rest of the world to oppose the tyranny that affects them.