"The Pianist" is a brilliant composition with Polanski as the virtuoso composer

Rating: 9/10 (27 February 2008)

"The Pianist" is a film that is impossible to dislike. In fact, it may be impossible to love it as well. It's a traumatic and difficult biographical account of one of the many unbelievable Holocaust survival stories. What makes "Pianist" stand out, however is the traumatic realism, the way that the story evolves to strike an emotional chord in regards to the Nazi's crimes and the unique role of music in the film.
"The Pianist" is the Oscar-winning best adapted screenplay from the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), an accomplished Jewish pianist in Warsaw right as World War II strikes. The film plays out as several scenes following a timeline from the initial invasion to the Warsaw ghetto to Szpilman's many hideouts in the city throughout the war. While the true sense of time is skewed and thus the true agony of Szpilman's isolation unrealized, the timeline clearly shows how the Jews and everyone in Warsaw for that matter had their lives transformed.
What makes this film so effective is the way Oscar winners Ronald Harwood (screenplay), but mostly director Roman Polanski, go right for your heartstrings. The Nazis are portrayed as cold-blooded killers. There is no emotional build-up or excessive suspense in the film's violent moments. It is sudden and mechanical, leaving you wondering how anyone could do such a thing, when the fact of the matter was that's exactly how it happened: many times arbitrary, heartless killing. The whole effect that Polanski has created with the violence being viewed by Szpilman and his family through windows, isolated from the mêlée, is very effective in the way that it connects with how the viewer is very much isolated from the true nature of the violence. Polanski conditions you to be afraid every time Szpilman looks out the window that violence might occur, which is exactly what Szpilman was: very curious about what was going on, but truly afraid. The effect is brilliant.
The films third Oscar winner, Brody, doesn't give an emotionally moving performance per say, but his performance is award-worthy in its realism through exquisite use of non-verbal skills and his natural demeanor. You can tell how the war has transformed him as a person through each stage--from day one to the final moments of the film.
If there's a weakness to the film, it's the fact that it doesn't spend enough time grasping Szpilman as a pianist. There is no sense as to how important his playing is or why he plays. Instead, the focus is more on the unfolding the events of WWII. While the idea the film presents of him being a pianist simply because that's what he knows to do is effective towards the end, a greater understanding of what playing the piano means to him would have been ideal in the beginning.
"The Pianist" is a tremendous achievement in terms of successfully telling a often repeated story in a way that is uniquely effective. It focuses on the aspect of the Holocaust that speaks to perseverance, basic survival in a life of fear that plays out outside your window. It is a tough film, but it's a good one.