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Not just a ‘holocaust’ movie
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The Pianist is bleak, harrowing, desolate and unnerving to the end. It will bombard your mind with terrible images of suffering nearly to the point of saturation.
Some of the most senseless, cruel injustices imaginable are present in this film. But is any of this surprising when the subject matter is the plight of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Poland?
Were The Pianist merely a 148-minute exhibition of atrocities it might be less significant; merely another film chronicling the importance of some very disturbing and important, but heavily documented and referenced events in history.
But director Roman Polanski (Repulsion, The Ninth Gate) has made a powerful and enveloping piece of film that is occasionally heavy-handed, but surprisingly free of petty didacticism.
Based on Wladyslaw Szpilman’s account of his experience in occupied Warsaw, the film involves two major stories, that of his family and his attempts to survive after being separated.
The first captures the forced march of events that lead to the family’s ghettoization and eventual shipment off to labor and death camps.
The dramatic irony is gut wrenching – it’s almost impossible not to yell at the screen when the Szpilmans nonchalantly decide to stay in their home because they believe the occupation will be over in a matter of weeks.
After this the film begins its descent into constant, suffocating transience as the family is constantly pushed into ever-worsening conditions.
The Nazis are demonic, yes, to an excruciating degree, but Szpilman doesn’t shy away from showing that many of the Jews in the ghetto, especially the upper class, slid into callousness and opportunistic social Darwinism instead.
There are no heroes here, only nepotists, survivors and victims.
Szpilman is saved at the last moment, continues alone, narrowly avoiding capture, helped and occasionally defrauded by Polish admirers who are rarely much better off than he is.
Beside the pathos and sympathy evoked, a great deal of jarring suspense and action keeps the movie rolling along – there is hardly a flat moment to be seen, even when viewing it through Polanski’s starkly simple, trick shot-free lens.
Adrien Brody plays Szpilman with an impeccable blend of dignity, stubborn optimism and fragility as he is gradually reduced to a tiny fraction of a man.
Polanski plunges us into a chilling world where it is nearly impossible to survive with dignity and men are spared from being loaded into a death train or being shot in the back of the head by their ability to soothe others’ ears with music.
Jim Toweill, The Arbiter
