Film Review: The Pianist (2002)

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Cynics might say that Roman Polanski took Spike Lee's advice and dedicated his latest film to the theme that should secure him an Oscar in advance - the Holocaust. But for Roman Polanski, this was not only an attempt to crown his career with a golden statue, but also a way to finally deal with the demons of his own past. Polanski spent Second World War as a Jewish child in German-occupied Poland and experienced more or less all the horrors associated with this dark period of world history - his mother ended up in a gas chamber, he served as a mobile target for SS soldiers to practice shooting, and was saved from near-certain death by his father smuggling him out of the infamous Kraków Ghetto and allowing him to survive the war by earning a living as a farm hand. All these experiences later left a mark on Polanski's career and made his films full of dark atmosphere, brutal violence and cynicism. But Polanski still couldn't face the experience directly, and even turned down the opportunity to direct Schindler’s List. The opportunity came only recently, when a book by the renowned Warsaw musician Wladyslaw Szpilman described events that bore a frightening resemblance to the film maker's traumatic experiences. The film became big hit in 2002, earning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and would have been an almost certain contender for Oscars if Roman Polanski's name had not been linked to paedophilia.

The film is based on the autobiographical book by Polish pianist Wladislaw Szpilman. The plot takes place in Warsaw and begins a few days after the German attack on Poland in the Autumn of 1939. Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a prominent Jewish pianist who has his own national radio program. After Luftwaffe bombs destroy Warsaw radio station, Szpilman goes home where his father (played by Frank Finlay) is preparing the family to move out of the city to safety. But when they hear on the radio that Britain and France have declared war on Germany , they are convinced that the Germans will be stopped and decide to stay. The German armies were not too impressed with the gesture, and three weeks later Warsaw is occupied by Hitler's hordes. The new administration immediately passes decrees regulating the position of Jews under new order - they are forbidden to perform certain tasks and hold a position in public office, they are not allowed to use public parks, they are required to own a limited amount of money in the house, they are not allowed to walk on the sidewalk etc. Szpilman is an optimist who believes that such a state of affairs will not last, but in 1940 all the Jews of Warsaw are forcibly moved to a ghetto - walled, cramped part of the city where hundreds of thousands of people would spend the next two years exposed to poverty, filth, disease, hunger, and an increasing escalation of violence by the SS and their helpers. Even in such conditions, the class division persists and Szpilman ensures for himself and his family some kind of existence by playing in a restaurant for the richer Jews. In 1942 all this comes to an end with "Final Solution" during which Ghetto will be gradually emptied and its inhabitants moved to "labor camps somewhere in the East". Szpilman, unlike his family and thanks to fortunate set of circumstances, avoids getting on one of the trains and it becomes clear to him that it is only a matter of days when all the Jews of the ghetto will suffer the same fate. He decides to run away and uses the opportunity to find himself on the other side of the wall where he would hide with the help of his old friend Dorota (played by Emilia Fox). With her help, he gets in touch with a resistance movement that will find him shelter in abandoned apartments. Szpilman will spend months there, making sure he doesn't make any noise and becoming addicted to the ever-diminishing amounts of food brought to him by his benefactors. But when the great uprising against the Germans starts 1944 and Warsaw begins turning into huge pile of rubble, Szpilman's survival becomes an even greater challenge.

The Pianist is a some sort of refreshment for an audience that was overwhelmed by the overproduction of films about the Holocaust. First of all, there are no camps, gas chambers and crematoria in this film. However, this does not mean that viewers will be spared the most disturbing scenes. In fact, the depiction of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, that is, of a group of people subjected to gradual dehumanisation and the loss of all dignity and hope, may even disturb and depress viewers more than the recognizable scenes of barbed wire, watchtowers and "Arbeit Macht Frei"signs. The Pianist also differs from most Holocaust films in its approach to matter. Other directors would make it all a sentimental fairy tale (Life Is Beautiful), a moralising drama or a standard Hollywood epic about the triumph of Good over Evil. Polanski, however, had a too complicated life to reduce this chapter of world history to a simple formula. Instead, he portrays with almost clinical objectivity the gruesome reality of the Holocaust, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. One might say that' The Pianist looks exactly what a Holocaust film would have looked like if it had been directed by Stanley Kubrick.

The most interesting thing about The Pianist is that objectivity is achieved by making the depiction of all these events from extremely subjective perspective. Everything that happens with the Warsaw Jews is traced only through the eyes of one man. And it is the character of this man that makes The Pianist perhaps the most different from other Holocaust films - he isn’t a hero, doesn’t possess special intelligence, ability to change the world around him or even to help his family. Even his survival is not a triumph of ingenuity - Szpilman owes his life to a happy set of circumstances and few benevolent people who provided him with housing (which was easy) and food (which was difficult). Polanski does not even allow the protagonist, except on a few rare occasions, to be overwhelmed by some emotions - at first he is an introverted musician who with common sense ignores the irrationality of the Holocaust, and afterwards he is too busy surviving to have time to think about what is happening, and he even reacts to the heroic episodes of the Warsaw with extreme disinterest, showing a lack of understanding for the motives of the insurgents. One such role required a really good actor and Polanski found him in Adrien Brody, until that time known mostly for his role in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. Brody prepared thoroughly for this job, losing large amount of weight for the purpose of this role. The physical decay of his character, whom we initially meet as a sophisticated Central European intellectual, and at the end we see as a caveman faithfully accompanies the demise of the city - a central European metropolis that, through the war years, turns into a pile of rubble.

Polanski once again demonstrated his filmmaking skills by successfully solving a serious problem posed to him by Szpilman's source. In the second half of the film, after Szpilman leaves Ghetto, almost nothing happens and the main character spends all the time indoors, so he can only watch the Warsaw uprisings through the window. But Polanski, with the help of Brody's acting and Wojciech Kilar's suggestive music, skillfully manipulates the audience and in their eyes even such a prosaic activity as cooking lunch becomes an event of epic significance. Polanski was also helped by a stellar international cast, most notably Emilia Fox, daughter of the famous British actor Edward Fox. In the end, even the ending of the film avoids the Holocaust-clichés - Szpilman becomes a radio pianist again, but there is no triumphalism there, and Polanski even heretically suggests that not only Jews or Poles, but also Germans were among the victims of these events. By refusing to bow to Hollywood clichés, Polanski created a film after which Spielberg, with his ultra-sentimental Schindler’s List, can hide in a mouse hole. It is, however, even more important as cinematic testimony of a dark time and a warning that such horrors must never happen again. That warning was quite warranted, since another major war set in motion and actually protested by Brody when he received well-deserved Oscar for Best Actor at the Academy Awards ceremony. Sadly, it appears that the world has learned nothing in past three decades.

RATING: 9/10 (++++)