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Film
Roman Polanski's redemption
[Photo: Focus Features.]
The Pianist tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, portrayed by Adrien Brody, whose middle-class existence in Warsaw is destroyed when the Germans invade. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 9, 2003
The renowned director turns in part to his own memories of Poland and the Holocaust in The Pianist, a poignant drama.
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The Holocaust is a recurring theme in feature films and documentaries, and always an effective one. Most of those movies, even great ones like Schindler's List and Shoah, usually focus on the most visceral terrors of the concentration camps.
The Pianist is a Holocaust drama without a single scene in a concentration camp, set exclusively in Warsaw when it was a bustling city, then a Nazi-controlled ghetto and then ruins by V-E Day. Jews die, but usually at a distance rather than because of in-your-face horrors even Steven Spielberg couldn't resist. There is heroism, but not the rallied resistance viewers may expect. There is even a sympathetic Nazi instead of the monolithic evil filmmakers usually depict.
Director Roman Polanski -- a name that hasn't been connected with the term "great filmmaking" in nearly three decades -- knows what moviegoers have seen before and is determined not to go that route. He also understands what is at stake if he doesn't adequately express the terror felt by millions of Jewish victims. Polanski, whose parents were prisoners and who also escaped the ghetto, found the right material in the autobiography of one man out of the millions.
Wladyslaw Szpilman was a popular piano player in Warsaw's carefree days, an apolitical person whose middle-class family exemplified prewar culture. When German forces invade Poland, Szpilman is the bystander who endures the humiliation of segregation and Star of David armbands with optimism that seems pitiful in hindsight. He was supposed to be on one of those trains to a death camp. Fate spares him for a lonely existence hiding in attics and apartments, peeking at a microcosm of the Holocaust on the streets outside.
Watching The Pianist, one gets the feeling that the tiniest details -- the grotesque way a corpse collapses, the price gouging for a single caramel divided among a family -- are the products of two eyewitnesses. Szpilman's autobiography, suppressed by Polish Communists until 1990 when the director discovered it, is an obvious source. But Polanski's own memories heighten his desire to get things right. The Pianist is a meticulous eulogy of European Jewish life before World War II and a tribute to the quiet perseverance of survivors such as Szpilman.
Adrien Brody, best known for his spike-haired suspect in Summer of Sam, plays Szpilman with shy elegance, escalating fear, trapped wits and sad triumph, in that order. For long passages of the film he's the only actor on screen yet we still know what's racing through his terrified mind. The performance ranks with Tom Hanks' Cast Away as a model of human versus environment dynamics. Brody doesn't have any bravura scenes, but he couldn't command our attention any more completely.
Equally striking is Pawel Edelman's cinematography, giving us Szpilman's detached looks at violence outside his hiding places. The musician's point of view, around a corner where death may await or over the edge of a tall roof where he almost falls, is essential to the muted tension Polanski wants.
The director's expert use of Szpilman's silence for survival culminates in a scene in which the musician, separated so long from his muse, moves into an apartment nearly empty except for a piano. He can't play or else he'll be found out. Brody underplays the anxiety, and Polanski devises a twist making us gasp and smile at once. Then pay attention to a later scene when a Nazi officer (Thomas Kretschmann) discovers Szpilman for a masterful example of timing with minimal dialogue.
Polanski's name has been mud in the United States for a quarter-century since his conviction for statutory rape and flight to Europe to avoid prison. The Pianist is the best chance he has had for redemption, in that peculiar way Americans can forgive celebrities if they're still entertaining. The Oscars welcomed back Charlie Chaplin and Elia Kazan after their indiscretions. In March, with a film as compelling as The Pianist, it may be Polanski's turn.
The Pianist
- Grade: A
- Director: Roman Polanski
- Cast: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Maureen Lipman, Emilia Fox, Ed Stoppard
- Screenplay: Ronald Harwood, based on the autobiography by Wladyslaw Szpilman
- Rating: R; violence, profanity
- Running time: 148 min.
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