Polanski's Triumph

Rating: Null/10 (9 February 2003)

Before this movie, the top two that I'd seen about World War II and specifically the Holocaust were Lina Wertmueller's "Seven Beauties" and the original "Jacob the Liar" from the former East Germany. (I haven't seen "Schindler's List.") Now there's a third. "Pianist" shares some traits with the others. One is that the German characters are not purely evil, although they do many evil things. Another is that the non-German characters are not purely saintly. (In "Jacob," the least sentimental and in my view the best of the three, there's a scene with some young kids being brats, as young kids often are in real life. This makes their impending death that much more compelling, knowing they'll never get the chance to grow out of their brattiness.) In addition, all three films focus on guys who are not soldiers or war heroes, in fact the protagonist of "Beauties" was a Mafioso. They're just trying to survive, even in a world that's gone nuts, because ultimately, that's all there is: the next breath, and then the one after it.
The title character of the pianist has a comfortable life in prewar Warsaw and is so devoted to his musical career that when bombs start going off outside his recording studio, he's reluctant to quit playing. We meet his family in their tastefully furnished home and see that they have as yet a dim notion of the realities of war, as they contemplate what to pack on the way to becoming refugees. (One suspects Roman Polanski drew on his own background as well as that of the book by the real-life pianist.) When they hear on the radio that Britain and France have declared war, they decide to stay put, naively assuming the foreign cavalry will come riding to the rescue.
The brilliance of the early part of the film is the gradualness of the hardships imposed upon this family. First it's one thing and then another, over a period of time. This lets us see how it's human nature to keep adjusting to new and deteriorating conditions, always hoping things will improve or at least not get any worse. An example is when they learn they will have to wear Jewish armbands in public. A few protest they won't do it. Later we see the father out in public with his armband. Later still, they all have one. It never gets referred to again. It just becomes another unpleasant fact of life. So by the time all the Jews in the city are ordered into a walled-off section, we see how they've been "eased into" it; had the Nazis decreed a ghetto from day one, that probably would've spurred an uprising.
Once in the ghetto, we see what anthropologists call a "behavioral sink" developing. I found this the hardest part of the movie to take, even more so than the later battles and carnage. It's not pleasant to watch kids dying in the street as adults walk past them, or to see a starving old man grab a bowl of gruel away from a starving old woman, then eat the spilled gruel off the street. But these are realities that we don't usually get to see, even on CNN these days. I don't know if Polanski has been accused of "anti-Semitism" but if he has been, it's probably due to these ghetto scenes, with some of the Jews living luxuriously (one guy in a cafe even orders the pianist to stop playing while he counts his money) while others starve, and some Jews working as police for the Nazis, and one character blaming their plight on American Jewish bankers not doing enough to get America into the war, etc. But Polanski's point is that the Warsaw ghetto was a microcosm of human society in extreme conditions. Sure they were oppressed because they were Jews but they suffered because they were human beings. Polanski underlines this with a scene of a guy reading the famous Shylock speech in "The Merchant of Venice." Fortunately such editorializing is kept to a minimum.
By the time the Jews are rounded up to be put on board the cattle car trains, they're so beaten down we see why they don't rise up and storm the guards (as one character suggests). It would be pointless anyway, and there's still that next breath to take, and the next one. At the last minute the pianist gets yanked out of line by a semi-friendly Jewish cop; his family members get shoved into the train and he never sees them again, there's no time for tearful farewells. For the remainder of the movie we see the pianist mostly hiding out.
The brilliance in this part is how rigidly Polanski sticks to the protagonist's point of view. Whatever horrible things are occurring, we only see what he sees. Some may be disappointed we don't see more of the armed uprising in the ghetto, for instance, which the pianist watches through the window of the hidden apartment he's occupying. But it's crucial that this remain HIS story. As we watch people getting killed at a distance, we even feel some relief we're not closer to it, which is how he must have felt. Guilt, maybe, but definitely relief too. There's still the next breath, and the one after that.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS FROM HERE ONWARDS

The narrative became a little disjointed in the movie's latter part; it wasn't always clear when things were occurring, or why, or who were all these various people in the pianist's life, but probably that was also deliberate, illustrating his state of mind as he became ever more detached from the events unfolding around him. The pianist focusses on the essentials: food, and breathing. His existence becomes almost purely reactive: if there's food, eat it; if there's danger, flee from it. Only the memory of his music reminds him of his personhood. In a scene where he's secreted with a piano and advised to remain silent, I actually thought for a moment he was going to play it, but of course, the survival instict wins out. Instead he plays a kind of "air piano."
Eventually the war comes right into his face in the form of a tank; there's great use of sound after a shell tears through a wall near him, I could actually feel my ears ringing. He's back in the street, seemingly the only living person in an endless cityscape of blasted buildings. In an abandoned hospital he finds a can of vegetables which he carries religiously for most of the rest of the movie. Finally he finds an empty house that even has a piano in it---and lo and behold, a German officer regarding him quizzically. This was also a real-life character who helped the pianist survive. In the movie it's not clear why, although we see a photo of the officer's family on his desk and he refers to God at one point; the actor is very good and subtle and I had no problem accepting what was occurring, but this was the only part of the movie with elements that reminded me of other movies, such as the "good" German in "The Keep," or the scene in Ralph Bakshi's animated "American Pop" with the American playing piano for the dying German. (I half expected the pianist in this movie to play "Lilli Marlene" or something for the officer.) Another minor problem is that the introduction of this "good German" at the end draws our focus away from the pianist. We start wondering what happened to the German after the war, and there are some onscreen words to tell us. But I think it would have been better if the German had just come and gone, like everyone else over the course of the film. It should have been another "brick in the wall" of the pianist's story of survival.
Many individual scenes stick in the memory; if I had to single one out, it would be when a German officer randomly pulls guys out of a group, has them lie down and then calmly walks along shooting each one in the head. When he gets to the last guy, he has to reload. While watching the doomed guy's face in his last few seconds I thought "What the hell would I be thinking in his place? Would I try a last desperate lunge, or just wait for the inevitable?"
Adrien Brody has to carry the movie and does an admirable job, especially in the early scenes when he has to grapple with an increasingly untenable situation. Later on, the physicality of the role takes over somewhat, as he becomes gaunt, shaggy, shivering and dazed. But at the end when he's back to a "normal" postwar life (or is it?) there's a residual sadness in his face as he plays. Fine acting all around (the woman seeking her missing husband was just a little on the hokey side) but I wish a decision had been made about the accents, viz. "Okay, in this movie English is actually Polish but we're going to use English accents." Fastidiously realistic sets and locations. The black and white footage at the beginning included a statue then seen periodically throughout, a nice anchoring touch.

Definitely not a popcorn flick, no emotional surge at the end a la "Saving Private Ryan." Should it matter to anyone that Mr. Szpilman survived the war and lived to a ripe old age? (Would it matter if any one of us did?) One may even wonder what the point of it all was .... a question worth pondering as we seem to be on the way to another war ....
"Szpilman" means "player," for those wondering about the German officer's remark that it's a good name for a pianist.