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The Pianist
By Dave DePino
Roman Polanski, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Poland himself, chose to adapt the novel "Death of a City," written by famed composer, pianist and fellow survivor, Wladyslaw Szpilman, as the film which brought the director back to his native Poland. The film is "The Pianist" which won last year's Palme d'Or at Cannes. Unfortunately, Szpilman never got to see this film. He died in 2000, at the age of eighty-eight.
It is so difficult to view a film about the holocaust without agonizing and questioning how this could have really happened in a civilized world. The answer is simple. Our world is not now, nor has it ever been, civilized. Just listen to the news or open up a newspaper. We've learned little, it seems.
The story opens in 1939 in Poland. The Germans have begun the occupation. Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is performing a concerto on live radio as the station is bombed. He refuses to stop playing until he almost gets blown out of the studio. Szpilman, his family, and many other well-to-do Polish Jews were a bit oblivious to the storm that was brewing outside their doors. They never thought that the stirrings would escalate and that they would be the targets in one of history's most horrendous displays of inhumanity. After all, they reasoned, the British and the French had entered the fray. It couldn't really go on much longer. Could it? And, then, when would the American Jews exert political pressure to have the U.S. enter the war?
"The Pianist" follows Szpilman as a young man, totally detached from politics and steeped in the life of a celebrated musician. The ugliness of reality doesn't come easily, not until his comfortable, familial world is taken away and all the expected amenities of daily life are stripped away. As he and his entire family are trudging to the camps via the boxcars, an influential friend, a Jew who capitulated and was working with the Nazis, literally pulls him out of line, saving his life. Szpilman runs, ill-equipped to make it on his own. He manages to come through the war by a series of unbelievable turns of good luck.
While laboring as a brick transporter - carrying bricks on his back - Szpilman helps to smuggle guns to a small group of resisters. One day, he just walks off, out of the work camp. That part was easy; the hard part was hiding and existing. Old contacts arranged for him to be put up in safe-houses right in the middle of the heavily-occupied German sectors, "right in the middle of the lion's den." One location was actually right across from a German, military hospital where Szpilman gets to view, from behind curtains, the increase of casualties as the war begins to turn.
The allies arrive and the bombing begins. Scavenging in the rubble of the city, the pianist's biggest problem is finding food. His final hideout is in a huge, bombed-out mansion, ultimately taken over by the Nazis. He is befriended by a good-hearted German officer (Thomas Kretschmann) who allows him to play a piece on the piano. The German sneaks food to Szpilman in the attic portion of the building and gives him his own winter coat. After the war, Szpilman tries to find this German, but he is too late. The officer dies in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp.
There are many interesting elements in this film which provoke thought and discussion, but one in particular is bringing to the fore the fact that there was a fledgling, underground resistance movement, which is sometimes overlooked in holocaust stories. We get to see guerrilla street fights showing some Jews who did resist and fought to the death. Pointedly, Szpilman's brother (Ed Stoppard) reads Shakespeare's famous Shylock speech ending "… and if you wrong us should we not avenge?"
Polanski, perhaps from childhood memories, meticulously unfolds the story so it becomes very personal and very real to us. We view the slow progression of terror. We see it through the eyes of a family first and later through the loneliness and fear of one of its members. The stark drama makes us aware and cautious of the freedoms we enjoy and realize that things could change at any time without our diligence.
We are encompassed by the dark clouds moving in with the introduction of identification armbands, all uniform and fulfilling regulations. This announcement over the radio sets the beginning chill in the family. Then laws stating Jews were not allowed to eat in restaurants, sit on public benches or even walk on the sidewalk occur. Then comes open humiliations and sporadic cruelties and murders, which become more and more frequent until very commonplace. This is followed by the immorality of relocation into walled ghettos like the one at Warsaw and the definitive atrocity of the death camps.
We've seen all this before in very well done films, but somehow, this time it's like being horrified anew. Polanski's attention to detail brings dozens of little mini dramas to the piece, i.e., an old man in a wheel chair thrown out of a window because he can't rise to his feet to honor his captors, a murdered woman slumped in an odd way and seen later the same day as she is just left like the multitude of other bodies in the streets, or Szpilman pantomiming playing the piano to keep his sanity. And then there is the troubling sight of affluent non-Jews, or capitulating Jews, enjoying their good lives as their friends and neighbors are forced into hard labor right in front of their eyes; or their turning away as complete families and entire city blocks of people are just disappearing.
The disturbing images of this film will linger long after you leave the movie house. Polanski is, once again, at the top of his game making a film a bit different from his usual work. This work cut closer to the bone, I guess.
Performances are uniformly committed and powerful. Brody brings all the emotional fundamentals together in this innocent artist struggling for life. Production designer Allan Starski's visual and atmospheric concept, captured by Pawel Edelman's cinematography, brings a chilling effect. The use of muted color and brownish hues and tones gives the film a more serious and aged look. Ronald Harwood's screenplay is faithful to the memoirs which were written immediately after the war and still fresh with blood in its fervor.
Though a terrific film, well worth seeing, it is not perfect. On the minus side, Szpilman's family seems to have disappeared from his memory. Surprisingly, they, or their surmised fate, are never mentioned. Also, the two and a half hours could be trimmed at bit.
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