for violence and brief strong language.Movie Review:
The Pianist
Allegedly, Steven Spielberg offered Roman Polanski the opportunity to direct Schindler's List, but Polanski turned it down because the subject was too personal for him. After all, Polanski lived in the Warsaw ghetto as a child and managed to escape the concentration camps (in which his mother died) only by living with various Catholic families in the countryside until the end of the war.
Knowing that, it is somewhat surprising that Polanski chose to direct The Pianist. A story about the life of famous Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman between 1939 and 1945, its point of view is very much first-person; this is the main thing that sets it apart from other Holocaust movies, which tend to focus on a group of people so as not to attempt to personalize the suffering.
The film opens in 1939, with Szpilman (Adrien Brody) playing the piano over the radio. While he is playing, the building he is in is bombed. Thus we start right away with the Germans entering Poland, leaving the exposition of Szpilman's life before the occupation to be inferred by the viewer. Clearly, he is well-known, but the passion for music he is supposed to have is invisible for the first half of the movie, unless you count the fact that he kept playing the piano during the studio bombing until he was actually hit by flying glass.
The rest of the film is simply Szpilman's attempt to survive the next six years. He is separated from his family when a Jewish policeman he knows pulls him out of a group about to board the train to a concentration camp. He stays in the ghetto working for a while, then is hidden by Gentile friends for a while, then makes his way back into a bombed-out section of Warsaw and manages to befriend a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann).
This last section is easily the best. For one thing, it largely dispenses with violence. While the violence of the Holocaust is well-documented and obviously necessary in any film on the subject, one is never surprised by the brutality. It's appalling, but it's hardly unexpected, and this minimizes its impact somewhat - an unfortunate fact.
For another, it actually displays Szpilman's passion for music. After he can no longer play at the cafe in the ghetto, Szpilman doesn't see a piano for almost an hour of the film - and even when he played before that, he just looked like another pianist. At one point he is put into a safe house with a piano but told to be quiet - he sits down and plays in the air a few inches above the keys. This is a strong scene as well, but it can hardly compare to Szpilman's discovery by the German officer. Szpilman says he is a pianist, and the German directs him to a piano. Szpilman sits down and plays, and Polanski lingers. Szpilman plays for five or ten minutes with increasing passion, looking every bit a man who has not been able to touch a piano in several years.
Credit Brody for this - in fact, credit Brody for keeping the film afloat in general. So much focus on one character's life, particularly when a lot of it covers ground that we've seen before, can be draining, but Brody makes Szpilman a very watchable character.
Still, the first-person narrative causes the film to suffer a bit. While it is remarkable that Szpilman was able to survive the entire Nazi occupation, it ends up seeming like we're only getting his story because he was famous. The film does not have any new lessons to add, and so we are left with a straightforward biopic set in an era we're only too familiar with. This does the vastly unfortunate - it makes the Holocaust seem trite.
Certainly The Pianist is not a bad film. But given its subject matter, it is a remarkably unimportant one. Brody's fine lead performance is the major selling point; were it not for that, there would be no particular reason to see The Pianist as opposed to renting Schindler's List.
There's nothing really wrong with The Pianist. It just treads familiar ground. B
The Pianist is a Focus Features release. Rated for violence and brief strong language.