Polanki's Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (5 June 2003)

I generally would never recommend that a film be required viewing for all young people, but "The Pianist" is not your everyday movie. It's a movie about the greatest crime in history, The Holocaust, told by two individuals who lived through it. It's based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish musician living with his family in Warsaw at the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland. The Szpilmans are Jewish and suffer the Nazi's monstrous designs for European Jewry. The story's told in almost a matter-of-fact way. First there are the required identification markings for Jews, followed by restrictions of movement, limits on the ownership of money...slowly, one step at a time, leading to mass murder. And Wladyslaw Szpilman is there through it all, extraordinarily lucky, and blessed with great friends, so that he lives through all six years of Nazi occupation. An amazing story of human survival.
The filmmaker, Roman Polanski, survived the Krakow ghetto as a child. With "The Pianist", he has made his best movie, his masterpiece, surpassing even his previous greats, "Chinatown" and "Repulsion". This is a great labor of love. It's perfectly filmed, the horror and humanity of the story hitting home like few movies, no, few works of art in any medium, can. If you haven't seen it, do so.