THE PIANIST REVIEW

The Remarkable Story of Polish–Jewish Musician Wladyslaw Szpilman.

The Pianist starts out in Warsaw in 1939. Wladyslaw Szpilman is a gifted pianist who specialized in played Chopin pieces, which he did over Polish radio. He played the last live music heard over Polish radio airwaves before Nazi artillery hit. He and his family, including his father his mother his older brother Henryk and his two sisters are all captured and sent to the Warsaw ghetto.

The Nazis then decide to exterminate some of the Jews in the ghetto, so they begin deporting them to the concentration camps. As he and his family are being loaded up on the trains to be shipped away to the camps, a former friend now a Nazi collaborator working as an auxiliary police officer saves him by pulling him out of the line.

He spends the next couple of years moving from hideout to hideout, helped by Jewish sympathizers, including a cellist he had met earlier, and a singer with her husband. After he can’t make it to any more safe houses, he spends the last part of the war in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is there he is confronted by a music-loving Nazi soldier named Captain, who helps Szpilman ride out the rest of the war after an impromptu performance given by the pianist.

There is a flaw that is probably impossible for Polanski to avoid. The pianist’s determination for survival also contains another message; to sustain selfishness. He fled from fighting the Nazi’s with his fellow Jews of the ghetto, and showed weak emotions towards the execution of his non-Jew friends who helped his hiding. It is probably a dilemma for Polanski to face as he chose to limit himself from changing the true-life story.

Adrien Brody played Wladyslaw Szpilman with passion and diligence. Thus character development of the pianist is top rated, as well as the Szpilman family which effectively portrayed beloved qualities and closeness set up to be heartbreakingly torn apart. It really hits you in the stomach, as what a powerful film should do.

Not a celebration of the human spirit, resisting both deceptive moral uplift and despairing moral nihilism, neither demonizing the Germans nor lionizing the Jews, The Pianist is a work of exquisite restraint. Any misstep might have resulted in reducing the horror of genocide to a prop in a morality-play, but Polanski sure-footedly avoids every trap and temptation in his path.

Several factors make The Pianist unique among Holocaust films. The story focuses on one individual, yet manages to encompass a remarkably lucid and thorough timeline of key events from 1939 to 1945. Surprisingly, the drama doesn’t ultimately turn to the concentration camps, instead focusing on the ongoing horror in and around the Warsaw ghetto.

The film’s most extraordinary aspect is its second half, in which all narrative expectations break down as the story heads into uncharted waters. At this point Adrien Brody’s singular performance, combined with his physical transformation, may inspire references to Tom Hanks’ one-man show in Cast Away; but here the performance is at the service of the story rather than the other way around, and Brody’s restrained and unshowy performance holds the screen without calling attention to itself.

The unpredictability of this second half comes to a head in a sickening twist of circumstances that anyone can see coming but the outcome of which is impossible to call, unless you know in advance how the story ends. At precisely a moment when there is no reason for anyone to be in danger, a stupid combination of factors suddenly ratchets up the suspense to an almost unbearable level, as Polanski confronts us with the specter of an unthinkably tragic turn of events.

Polanski takes a direct, unfussy approach to the material, refraining from playing on the viewer’s nervous system with such cinematic tricks as handheld cameras, rapid editing, reliance on musical cues, and so forth.

Instead of always putting the audience in the middle of the action, Polanski shows us everything through Szpilman’s eyes, much of the time focusing on events in which Szpilman is not personally involved but only witnesses, often through windows.

For example, when the 1943 ghetto uprising takes place, we see only what can be seen from the window of the flat in which Szpilman is hiding, and then only when he happens to be looking out the window.

This, of course, isn’t the most visceral or horrifying way of presenting such events — though The Pianist contains images as uniquely and indelibly horrifying as anything we’ve seen in any film. But Polanski isn’t interested in mere emotional impact. He’s giving us a human perspective on the story, rather than an omniscient one.

The restraint we feel in even some of The Pianist’s most horrific moments represents the necessary distance of an eyewitness who was neither one of the perpetrators nor their targets.

The Pianist is not about outrage and triumph, good and evil, cowardice and courage. It is simply, starkly about life and death, civilization and chaos. It doesn’t ultimately explain or illuminate the evil of the Holocaust, any more than does Szpilman’s music or any other work of art.

I hope you enjoyed my review on The Pianist.

So till my next post ya, its bye from Ganz.

---