‘The Pianist’

Roman Polanksi focuses on the minutia of personal degradation and humiliating deaths in this film about Nazi brutality.   [R]

By: Bob Brown
   The Nazis’ 1939 invasion of Poland began one of their longest and most brutal occupations of World War II. By design, the Polish intelligentsia were to be liquidated. By degrees, the Jews were humiliated and pushed into ghettos. Those who weren’t murdered or shipped to extermination camps were pressed into slave labor. Thugs carried out the relentless, brutal dirty work, their bestiality unimpeded.
   In Roman Polanski’s film, based on the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir, Death of a City, none of this brutality is left to the imagination. Nazi atrocities are hardly a secret, and many films have treated them in more or less blunt fashion. But with Polanski, it isn’t the gore that horrifies so much as it is the wanton indifference to suffering. The gleeful abandon with which Nazi soldiers and their collaborators casually torment and slaughter Jews will be hard for some viewers to stomach.

"Adrien
Adrien Brody plays a talented Polish musician confronting Nazi occupation in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.


   Polanski has drawn inspiration and urgency from his own experience as a child in the Cracow ghetto. For an authentic feel, he enlisted the aid of production designer Allan Starski, who designed the look of Schindler’s List as well. This film, set in old Warsaw, has a dark monochromatic palette of browns and grays. Other Polish artists contributed to the breathtaking impact of the film, both its look and its music, including cinematographer Pawel Edelman and composer Wojciech Kilar. For their efforts, and that of a remarkable cast, the film won the Palm d’Or at Cannes in 2002. The piano playing is not Adrien Brody’s (although as Szpilman he appears to handle a keyboard well), but that of a Polish Chopin specialist, Janusz Olejniczak.
   Aside from Harrison’s Flowers (2000), also featuring Brody, no other contemporary film quite captures on a personal level the wanton, senseless violence of war. It is the minutia of personal degradation and humiliating deaths that are so disturbing.
   Szpilman’s frank account follows his fight for dignity and then survival as the Germans infested Warsaw. In 1939, he, his parents and his siblings lived in modest middle-class comfort while he earned a living as a pianist for Polish radio. He was poised for a great career, having studied under Arthur Schnabel at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and already having composed concertos, numerous works for piano and orchestra, and even film scores. As an accomplished artist, he deserved the celebrity he was beginning to enjoy.
   All this slammed shut like the lid on a keyboard when the Warsaw ghetto was created. All Jews were herded into a delimited area, where they were virtual prisoners. Szpilman and his family were reduced to finding menial jobs, if they could even get any work. It wasn’t long before the inevitable random executions began, and the herding of hundreds of families to rail sidings, where Nazis forced them onto cattle cars and shipped them off to oblivion. Certain Jews tried to save themselves by serving their captors as police.
   Szpilman tries valiantly to save his family from this fate, finding them jobs, but he is saved himself when a sympathetic collaborator pushes him away from a death train and warns him to flee. His survival depends on luck and on an underground network of other sympathetic Poles, who hide him in vacant apartments for months at a time. Brody uncannily portrays Szpilman’s descent from an urbane, gifted musician to a hunted creature.
   Before now, Brody’s frenetic acting style has tended to get in his own way. Whether it’s the character or Polanski’s direction, Brody has had to draw on an inner intensity. This role is a career-maker that should earn him an Oscar nomination. His Szpilman disappears when he needs to be invisible, but he burns and suffers to live. All the while, his hunger and passion for his music is as sharp as that for whatever food he can find — a few bread crumbs, chunks of rotting potato. Knowing he cannot make a sound without being discovered, Szpilman feasts on imagined music when he is faced with a piano. As he sits near starvation, strains of Chopin are heard as if the pianist is playing them on a ghostly keyboard.
   That hunger for his art keeps him alive as much as any meal. When civilization seems to have dumped values off a cliff and people are reduced to acting like dogs, the last scrap of humanity is what the mind holds onto from art, a repository for the spirit. Brody balances this condition of humanity suspended. He does not act "heroic" in a self-sacrificing way. He is scared and on the run but resourceful. When he needs the piano to save himself, all that bottled up life force comes bursting forth in a cathartic rush that is both musically and dramatically satisfying.
   This is a brilliant, disturbing film.
   See it and you will never hear Chopin the same way again.
Rated R. Contains violence and brief strong language. In English and German with English subtitles.