Adrian Brody's Terrfic in this wartime Biopic

Rating: Null/10 (26 July 2011)

This is an excellent movie/biography of a famed Jewish and Polish pianist during the occupation of Poland (specifically Warsaw) from 1939-45. Over the course of the filming Adrian Brody lost an astonishing amount of weight while he realistically portrayed a Jewish man that suffers horrific indignities while imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. Roman Polanski the director spliced some incidents of his own childhood (as he lived in Krackau during the Nazi occupation) and those of the real Pianist, along with some other experiences of Poles and Jews in the Polish Ghettos at that same time. This picture was filmed in Poland in some of the oldest existing apartment blocks to provide some realism, and the movie relies very little on special effects during the German invasion or that of the Soviet/German fighting and destruction while the city was nearly destroyed. It was very interested to see real (although brief) footage and faces of Warsaw peacetime before the Sept 1 1939 invasion. No doubt many of those people did not survive the years of occupation, genocide and war and were the real people that this movie tries to portray. Thomas Kretchsmann is memorable as the real life German officer who has some interaction with Brody's character and was celebrated later in life for helping some Jews survive Nazi occupation.