It's one man's soulful plight from the rein of terror...

Rating: Null/10 (13 December 2002)

An incredibly touching film that keeps the audience embodied in the appalling ill-fate of Wladyslaw Szpilman and the ghetto Jews at Warsaw's Varsovia from 1939 to 1945. And it's the cinematic portrayal of inhumane survival is simply astounding. It serves well in allowing the viewers to feel the eminent empathy of Szpilman. It's a film that seems to cry out for the audience to connect with the horror at a distance. Yet it leaves no room for superficiality but allows each frame of event glows with gradual transcendence.
Roman Polanski's style of on screen narration is truly awesome and unique. He injects an enormous sensitivity of human feelings into this masterpiece through his principal character. It's a Holocaust film, solidly and powerfully approached with surrealism, realism, and cynicism. And its contents are without the overwhelming and overlapping necessity of injecting the visual GCI escapades of gore and hype, as used in many Hollywood Holocaust films to channel emotions. He uses GCI effects intelligently, recreating the scenes of structural bleakness. And call it courage, perhaps, Polanski does acknowledge that Varsovia has its good and evil residents, existing from all walks of life, and from varied creeds, cultures and classes. Based on Szpilman's 1946 novel, this movie is slapped with abundance of visual horrors associated with one man's emotions in his struggle to stay alive. Yep, this film does pound on one man's experience of the inescapable dehumanizing aspects shown to, or faced by people, within a war zone, as well as on the possibility of human kindness, associated with the terror of war. Eerie and absolutely haunting... almost as if Director Roman Polanski is filming a documentary of a man's survival plight from a petrifying insane asylum where no man survives without turning traitor, or without the fortune of helping hands! The gray landscapes and, oft times, the pure silence add to the effects of numbness to the scenes. They echo one fugitive's trauma within an ugly period of history.
Roman Polanski does not bombard his movie with the use of visual bloody gore and grime to cast the ghastliness of Szpilman's story. Instead, viewers are led to follow Szpilman's moves, feeling his alleviating fear and consternation, watching the happenings as he sees. This film captures, non-stop, the moods of desperation and struggle. We pause, we gape, in total silence and heaviness, while each scene flows. We wonder how long before he too will be packed into a cattle truck to be sent off to Treblinka. With every act that Szpilman makes, the viewers are inclined to feel they are in his shoes, searching, escaping, and feeling the cold sweat of numbness  at oft times void of emotions, almost parallel to the deserted and desiccated, eerie city portrayed without its signs of life.
The story deals with the creepy take on human dehumanization, bringing an uncanny composition of trodden despair on to the screen. All the dehumanizing events appear as if at a distant and only through his eye  without the usual coaxing of GCI effects of visual gore or slaughter. Everything appears through curtain-drawn windowpanes or window cracks, and through small openings of doors and walls. But it's how the Szpilman character reacts to what he sees that keeps me shaken and mesmerized throughout the film. Those abstract onscreen emotions keep the movie alive just as Szpilman's music has kept him alive. In addition, the film's bleak surroundings and the tragedy of the tortured man's character render a thematically and artistically eerie outlook to the film's moods.

Adrien Brody is truly deserving of an Oscar nomination for his performance. If one has seen a photo of the real youthful Szpilman, one can see some facial resemblance between the actor and the real individual. Szpilman, once a renowned and dignified musician has become sickly, intimidated, alone and very desperately hungry. The only strength left in him is for staying alive. The only belief he holds is his music. I was immensely captivated by Brody's facial and bodily expressions, both at the time of his character's fame, and thereafter by his portrayal of the character's fear, hunger and destitution. He brings out a credible Szpilman thrown into a downright appalling and inhuman situation where only miracles could save him. Brody plunges me right into the heart of his character's journey of fatigued mental sufferings, while witnessing with him the blanched and distantly terror of Varsovia. My response: I felt ill and isolated, and completely in pain and fear till the finale. That's how powerful Brody projects his acting talent. That's how powerful this film is. Powerfully told with the powerful on screen images! Overall, the cast ensemble aptly supports Brody's role. The music of his Szpilman also establishes an amazing tone and feel of the surroundings. Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp minor still plagues my ears. It comes through three most unforgettable moments: the first instance when the explosion of the German bomb hits the audience's eyes, and when Szpilman plays it to the German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, and when it filters through the Polish Radio. Truly exhilarating!
This is definitely a poignant and memorable movie to see  especially during our own contemporary times of terror.