|
 The
Pianist is based on the memoirs of Polish musician Wladyslaw
Szpilman, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, and it’s Roman Polanski’s
strongest and most personally felt movie. This should not come as
a great surprise, since as a child Polanski survived the Kraków
ghetto and lost family members in the Holocaust. The real surprise
is that the horrors on display in The Pianist are presented
matter-of-factly -- which of course makes them seem even more horrific.
We are not accustomed to such reserve in a movie about the Holocaust,
and especially not in a Polanski movie, where the violence has often
been close to Grand Guignol. But in this film he is trying to be
devastatingly true to his emotions, and so there is no need for
hyperbole. At times, the tension between the unwavering directness
of his technique and the anguish that is behind it is almost unbearable.
When we see a Nazi soldier casually shoot a Jewish girl in the head
for asking an innocent question, or when we see soldiers throw an
old man in a wheelchair over a balcony, we are staring into an everyday
inferno.
Szpilman, who is played with feral grace by Adrien Brody, survived
it: Alone among his family, he managed to escape from the ghetto
and hide out in Warsaw until the war’s end. We first see him in
1939, not quite 30, playing Chopin during a radio broadcast interrupted
by German bombing. At the end, we see him playing the same nocturne
in a concert hall that had once been shelled. It’s as if his story
had come full circle, except that he is crying now and savoring
each note the way he savored each morsel of food in captivity. Halfway
through the movie, there’s a great, brief scene where Szpilman is
hidden away in a Warsaw apartment and unable to touch its piano
for fear of alerting the neighbors to his presence. The silent agony
that ensues is one of the most powerful expressions of spiritual
denial I’ve ever seen in a film. Szpilman’s artistry is not sentimentalized;
we are never made to feel that he stayed alive because of it. Mostly
he survived on luck and gumption. But Polanski recognizes the soul-deep
power that music held for Szpilman, and his playing in the end is
both an anthem of renewal and a lament. Polanski doesn’t sentimentalize
the Jews, either. The Jewish police employed by the Germans in the
ghetto are shown to be almost as ruthless as their overseers, and
some of the underground operatives turn out to be scoundrels. In
his memoir, which was published in 1946 under the title Death
of a City and soon banned by the Communists, Szpilman wrote
that his experience shattered his belief in the “solidarity of the
Jews.” No doubt some people will regard the divulging of that experience
as a betrayal, but Polanski honors the Jews of Warsaw by not romanticizing
them; besides, there are many acts of extraordinary generosity and
courage in The Pianist. They are just as inexplicable as
the depravities.
Although he engages in some minor arms smuggling, Szpilman himself
is not especially brave or virtuous. He is not the kind of conventional
hero -- or anti-hero, for that matter -- a movie such as this would
seem to require. He’s a watcher, a reactor, and yet his recessiveness
has metaphorical power: Szpilman is like a wraith witnessing the
ruin of his beloved city and its people. (The Pianist is,
among others things, a eulogy for Warsaw.) When he is finally driven
out of his hiding places and wanders the blasted streets, the imagery
goes beyond starkness into the surreal -- we might be looking at
a lunar landscape by De Chirico.
The most remarkable aspect of Szpilman’s memoir is that it was
written so close to the time of the events described and yet is
full of poise and equanimity. There is no ache for revenge in his
book, and there is none in Polanski’s film, either. Szpilman lived
out his days in Poland as a celebrated pianist and composer of popular
songs and children’s music, dying in 2000. Polanski, whose notorious
and harrowing life is well known, had not, until this movie, filmed
in Poland in 40 years. And yet these two men, who might appear from
their lives and works to be temperamentally unalike, share a distaste
for special pleading or bathos. In The Pianist, suffering
is seen with such clarity that its relief becomes a balm of the
greatest magnitude. It’s the relief we get when Szpilman plays the
piano again, or merely makes it through another day. In moments
like these, we are confronted with the significance, the momentousness,
of the ordinary. (1 hr. 48 mins.; PG-13) — PETER RAINER
Spotlight: Adrien Brody
"I felt the impact of everything on me," says Adrien Brody of his
role in Roman Polanski's The Pianist, the director's first
film to address World War II. The picture was partially shot in
Poland, and is set in the Warsaw Ghetto -- a place much like the
ghetto Polanski himself survived and his mother did not. Based on
the Polish piano star Wladyslaw Szpilman's autobiography, the film
required a tremendous commitment from its lead. "I felt the importance
of what this film means. It was grueling," Brody says of a role
that required him to learn Polish and German, lose 30 pounds, and
learn how to play classical piano. "But it was also extremely powerful.
I felt honored that Roman cast me." Brody plays much of the film
without actors, alone among horrifically realistic re-creations
of the bombed-out ghetto. "I cried when I shot my first scene,"
the 29-year-old says. Still bone-thin, the New York native calls
the experience a real turning point in his life. "I tried to experience
a taste of the deprivation they felt. I owed it to Szpilman, and
I owed it to Roman as well."
Opens December 27
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
|
