One man's struggle to survive.

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2003)

This film wasn't nearly as good as I expected. It tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, Poland's most accomplished pianist, who escaped the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. This is not the assault on your emotions that "Schindler's List" was. Rather, it's pretty much a tale of survival, how one man plumbs the depths of humanity and survives to play his beloved music again.
Adrien Brody plays Szpilman, and he does it well. He has to because one of my complaints is that there's little character development other than Szpilman. We're introduced to his family in Warsaw and get to know them, but they're carted off to the death camps before the halfway point of the movie.
One of the best lines in the film occurs here. Szpilman tells his sister as she's about to be loaded into a freight car, "I know this is an awkward time to say this, but I wish I knew you better." She smiles back warmly at him. Very real and very touching.
But after Szpilman is pulled out of the line by a friend and spared, it's basically just him for the second half of the movie. We meet people on his work crew where he's found refuge and the people in the underground who help him hide from the Nazis, but they're only on screen briefly and are never really developed as characters in the film.
The closest we get to seeing into the soul of another person is when a Nazi officer finds him hiding in the attic of a bombed-out building and gives him food and a coat to wear. But even here, the Nazi captain, played by Thomas Kletschmann, is only in the film for a few minutes and then reappears briefly in the end where he's about to be shipped off to his death in a Russian prison camp.
Adrien Brody plays his part well, but he's not an expressive actor, at least not in this role. He looks dignified and a bit aloof at first, then develops the mournful gaze of someone who's seen too many bad things, but it's all in the eyes. There isn't a whole lot of dialogue other than what's needed to advance the story.
Not a bad film, but not a classic. An interesting tale of one man's determination to survive, but it could just as easily been about someone trapped on a deserted island as it was about someone in wartime Poland.