gripping though flawed drama

Rating: Null/10 (14 June 2003)

`The Pianist' is a bit like `Schindler's List' as seen from the inside out. The one flaw in that earlier film always seemed to be that, by choosing to make a Gentile  Oskar Schindler - the protagonist in his film, Spielberg turned the Jews themselves almost into background players in their own story. That doesn't happen with `The Pianist' since the hero in this case happens to be himself a Jew  the real life Polish pianist and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman - who managed, through strength, determination and the assistance of a number of brave and caring individuals, to survive the horrors of that darkest and most inexplicable chapter in 20th Century history.
This is not to say that `The Pianist' is a better film than `Schindler's List'  far from it. For while this latest work from Roman Polanski is a fascinating tale of survival in its own right, the film lacks the moral and psychological resonance that made Spielberg's work such a universally acclaimed masterpiece. Because Schindler was an outsider looking in, he was forced to make the kind of moral choices that Szpilman never really faces in the situations in which he finds himself. In fact, the one time that the protagonist is confronted with such an option  having to decide whether or not to betray his people by joining the Jewish police whose job it is maintain order in the Warsaw ghetto  Szpilman flat out declines the offer. This may, indeed, be the way circumstances played themselves out in real life, but this elimination of any kind of psychological depth makes `The Pianist' seem frustratingly superficial at times.
Although the film isn't as rich and powerful as it might have been, `The Pianist' is still exceptional on a lot of different levels. First of all, Polanski and his screenwriter, Ronald Hardwood, both of whom won Oscars for their work here, capture the brutality and sadism of the Nazi regime with frightening candor and almost `reportorial' objectivity. As in `Schindler's List,' people in this film die in very believable, very graphic ways. Particularly interesting are the early sections of the film in which we witness the gradual steps leading up to the eventual deportation and extermination of the Warsaw Jews, beginning with the curtailment of Jewish civil rights, then to the branding of them with stars of David on their clothing, then to their imprisonment in the Warsaw ghetto, and, finally, to the inexorable walk to the gas chamber. `The Pianist' doesn't take us that far on screen, but we sure sense the presence of those death camps in the loss of Szpilman's entire family. `The Pianist' brilliantly recreates this shameful era in recent human history and does so without becoming sentimental and pretentious in the process.
Adrian Brody won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance here, and he is very good indeed, especially given the fact that the role calls for him to be more of a reactor to the events around him than a catalyst. Polanski and Hardwood have provided this fine young actor with a veritable tour de force assignment that he executes with a great deal of skill and aplomb. Unfortunately, a number of the other characters - particularly those who go out of their way to help him - remain stubbornly enigmatic throughout.
`The Pianist' is an honorable addition to the list of fine films that have attempted to come to grips with the subject of the holocaust. But, for my money, the best still remains `The Shop on Main Street,' the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language film of 1965. This superb Czech film does what `The Pianist' is never quite able to do, which is to find a way to involve us in the momentous moral dilemmas that undoubtedly faced many of the people involved in this life-and-death event. `The Pianist,' by making its tale strictly a story of survival and not a study of human psychology, fails to illuminate much of what we really need to know about that time. And about ourselves.