Polanski's Best

Rating: 8/10 (30 March 2003)

It was a fine movie that could have benefited from some tighter editing. Brody was brilliant in the lead role, and Polanski has easily made the most harrowing movie of his career.
I haven't read the book, but one thing that fascinated me about the first 1/3rd or so of the movie was that life in the ghetto was almost being told from a child's perspective. Certain things had an emphasis that I wonder if they came from the book or from Polanski's memories of being a child in the middle of the Holocaust. For example:
Szpilman keeps running into a somewhat deranged woman who
wanders the ghetto in a fur coat, looking for her husband.
There's an old man entertaining a group of children.
The way the adults dove for food that hit the ground.
Many shots of the ghetto seem to be taken from close to the ground looking up, not so much at Szpilman's eye level.
There was also good use of sound throughout the movie, but I note that it was not nominated for a Best Sound Oscar.
The movie is interesting in that, here and there, there's an attempt to humanize a Nazi, something pretty much unseen in Holocaust movies since the late '70s miniseries The Holocaust (the Michael Moriarty character, while he invents ways to more rapidly exterminate Jews, feels very guilty about it). The music-loving commander near the end of the movie, who sees the end and would rather not go out of his way to kill every Jew he stumbles over.
The main flaws in the movie were a tendency to let scenes drag a little (particularly towards the middle) and not really indicating what a celebrity Szpilman was pre-war (if that was the case). According to the movie, he seemed to be the last person to perform on Polish radio before the Germans took over. For nearly half of the movie, he's no where near a piano (for obvious reasons), but, when he is, he seems like he's a talented but fairly pedestrian classical pianist. Is surviving the war what made him great?