THE PIANIST review

THE PIANIST is a film that most will see exclusively as a Holocaust film. A movie about the Warsaw Jew experience over the course of Nazi Occupation. I agree with these things. I hold that Roman Polanski’s THE PIANIST is not only the most exceptional film set during and concerning the Holocaust, not only is it the best film in Roman Polanski’s amazing career… And yes, I am including those early Polanski films… But this is also the best film about the universal struggle of art, the artist and beauty against the horrors and trials that mankind and fate has put before it. This is the struggle of genius to weather hell. The pursuit of a dream through the darkest recesses of the human existence. THE PIANIST is a towering work of genius, breathtaking at each and every corner it takes.

I saw this film in my least favorite environment to watch a film. My least favorite time of the morning and with a very very bad ankle that I was being told to stay off of, but this was the Golden Palm triumph film by Roman Polanski that I’ve been dying to see since I very first heard those reports from Cannes. I was told that the film was a horror movie set in reality. That it was a variation on I AM LEGEND with Nazis. This is very very far from the truth.

Imagine a musician that is quite talented. He was just on the verge of international fame. His tickling of the ivories was breathtaking, he was in love with the piano, to the way it sounded when his hands danced across it. His world, the world of Poland listened to him make love to the piano the way few have ever heard on the National Radio. He’s in the middle of Nocturne in C-Sharp minor when the Germans begin shelling Warsaw. The Radio technicians signal him to stop and to hide, he waves them of and continues to play… Music is his shield, how could fate stop such beauty from finding completion. Our eyes dance along those fingers doing an Astaire right with the Rogers left tapping the most lovely of melodies to our ears while entrancing our eyes. The shells fall closer, it gives him a start, yet he continues to play, bliss covering a mask of concern, until a shell showers him with glass and splinters, causing a scalp cut… and he stops. Frustrated at not being allowed to complete. He leaves the room only to find beauty on the panicked stairs, a lovely young cellist who adores his work. The Nazis are a million miles away according to the eyes of young Wladyslaw Szpilman. He has no idea what is coming or how serious it will be. For him, this lovely blonde represented a future he wanted. A musician to share life. She was not Jewish, merely a beautiful Polish woman. The war changed everything.

Wladyslaw is a man that could weather everything as long as the hope of music was on the other side. His faith in the temporary nature of the horror was seemingly limitless. He was not a killer, no matter what happened, he did not have that capacity. He could not destroy, he created. He wasn’t a coward, he just did not have the ability to hurt another human being. He played music that brought people together, his fingers were meant for keys not triggers. He suffered for that, but he survived, he weathered all to create. He endured for the sake of music.

Here is an artist that lost it all, but did not allow himself to be paralyzed by his experience. He held tight to his hopes and dreams and on the other side – well on the other side his music lived and his story was told.

His story is harsh. It condemns the American Jew for not doing more to get the United States involved in World War 2 sooner. It condemns the Nazis for what they did, but at the same time… the film shows what the Warsaw Ghetto did to his own people. How the Jews that were gathered into that terrible place were turned into greedy uncaring people that would take advantage of one another, steal from one another, beat one another as well as bond and help. It showed how an inferior number of Nazis through a series or reward and punishments managed to convince a doomed population that things were getting better right up until death.

The movie is much less a series of scenes stapled together from various stories like SCHINDLER’S LIST. In that film, when you see the hinge-maker killed, he’s a human being, and we mourn his death as we would that of any human being we witness killed, but we did not know what he left behind, who he was, what we were really losing.

In THE PIANIST we see many atrocities, and those atrocities are all the worse for having characters behind them. This is one man’s story. One man that was in the lines of people that 10 were picked to die from. One man that fate seemed particularly fond of, even with everything that he endured, it is absolutely breathtaking to see his narrow sidesteps of death. It is horrifying to watch the reward/punishment electroshock style manner that the random deaths were used to condition. If you survived, there were almost a feeling of being thankful to the Nazis for having not chosen you to die that day. I’ve never really seen this portrayed as effectively as it was here.

I've read a book on how the SLA used torments and rewards to brainwash Patty Hearst, it is entirely another to see it being used on a population of 700,000 in the walls of that hideous Ghetto. Watching the Jews build their own prison, make their own concentration camp clothes, whittle their own possessions down smaller and smaller till they abandon even the dearest of things in the end. Watching this film is absolutely captivating, because at the very beginning I know that Adrien Brody’s Wladyslaw Szpilman was going to survive. Anyone that has ever heard his divine music knows that. It was the journey that was fascinating.

Seeing what he saw, being told by a filmmaker that was there, a filmmaker that would not blink or fail to show the depths that man could sink. This isn’t the story of the noble Jew enduring the Nazi torments… This film shows that starving hordes would rip a bowl of soup from a woman’s hands to lick the spilt soup from the street as it flowed into the gutter. This shows how humans were made inhuman. It is a wonder that on the other side, any survivor could ever readjust. It wasn’t just what the Nazis did, but what they did to themselves. This film shows that not every Jew went softly, that not every Polish person ignored it, that not every Nazi hated the Jews. This film is about laying one man’s life down as to how it went.

THE PIANIST is based upon the book written by Wladyslaw Szpilman immediately upon the conclusion of WWII. The film spares no group from stereotype, and paints the Holocaust as something far more complex than good guys and bad guys… tormentor and victim.

The filmmaking is breathless… from the mental concerts played 3 inches above piano keys to constant elation of being spared. There are moments in the film where you see something that borders on Science Fiction. You just can’t believe that what you’re looking at is something of the past and not from James Cameron’s TERMINATOR future.

ANYONE that marginalizes this film as ‘another Holocaust’ film doesn’t have one iota of a clue what they are talking about. Adrien Brody is absolutely captivating in the film. Performances rarely are this fine. Watching him run the gamut of emotions from happiness to distraught suicidal to suave cool to resembling and performing many of these as a silent performer – for fear of being killed, for being found. This story is absolutely the best story you’re likely to see on film this year.

I don’t know what sort of Academy campaign budget this film has, but frankly if this film doesn’t wind up with a whole host of nominations for everything from Adapted Screenplay, Director, Cinematography, Editing, Best Actor, Best Picture and Art Direction… then who the hell cares one bit what the Academy has to say. This is cinema, film and movies. This is a flick that tells a story that is profound, captivating and entrancing and if that story goes unrewarded by the public and the awards shows, then they deserve the films they do get to see.

Movies are not getting worse, audiences are. Films like this one don’t deserve to be hidden in the dank recesses of College Theaters, they deserve to be seen at a theater near each and every single one of us. This is a huge story, and just because it isn’t being told by a Steven Spielberg, doesn’t mean it isn’t an absolutely arresting film experience worthy of being seen by everyone on this planet. The fact that it won’t, is just another testament to just how fucked up the film industry, the distribution system, the advertising and the audiences of film can be.

Absolutely the best film I’ve seen this year to date.

To Answer Talk Backers below - I have seen every Polanski film since REPULSION - many times. CHINATOWN is a great film with a great script by Robert Towne. HOWEVER, THE PIANIST has a superior story, a much stronger central character, stunning dramatics, far stronger tension, emotion and narrative. This film has a pulse and says more about far many more important subjects than CHINATOWN. The film is Polanski's most brutal, far more affecting than REPULSION or ROSEMARY'S BABY. It combines everything that Polanski has sought to do as a filmmaker into his best work. And I say that after a single viewing with absolute conviction. This film will improve upon each viewing. If I were you, I'd hold my criticism till you've at least seen the film.