***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Adrien Brody, Emilia Fox, Ed Stoppard, Frank Finlay, and Thomas Kretchsmann
Directed by Roman Polanski & written by Ronald Harwood, from the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman
2002 R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2002
One of my favorite stories is the one about the boy and his grandfather walking on the beach. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have been washed up onto the sand and are doomed to die. As he and his grandfather walk along, the little boy picks up starfish and throws them back into the ocean to save them. The grandfather says to him, there are thousands of starfish on this beach. You can’t possibly save them all. That’s true, says the boy, lifting another starfish. But I can save this one.
“The Pianist” is Roman Polanski’s film about how Wladyslaw Szpilman, a real-life Polish musician, survived the Holocaust through the kindness of others and dumb luck. It is based on the late Szpilman’s autobiography, but many of the scenes and heartbreak must have come from Polanski’s own experiences, which include the death of his mother in a concentration camp, and his subsequent wandering of Poland. It is an amazingly visceral film, of starving, standing in the rain, hiding in closets and crawlspaces, and being powerless to save those dying around you, or even to protect yourself. Time and time again, men and women all around Szpilman are selected at random and shot dead for no reason. Szpilman is not especially clever, resourceful, or brave, and many of those who died next to him were arguably more deserving of mercy. He makes use of the underground and the black market, but is never shown as being smart enough to create them, and he can only manipulate them well enough to keep himself alive for one more day. For every step that Szpilman survives, someone else must have gotten just as far, only to die a few steps away from rescue. Aside from being such a visceral, gut-wrenching experience, “The Pianist” asks, why should I live, when so many others die?
Szpilman is a shy, passive, likable man, and not at all likely to survive anything as horrendous as the Final Solution. We meet him during a performance on Warsaw radio that is cut off when a German bomb blows out the nearest window. What happens next we’ve seen before: the rights of Polish Jews are gradually eroded by their German occupiers, and they lose money and property, before finally being moved into a ghetto and off to labor camps. Polanski fills the episodes of Szpilman and his family—he stills lives with his parents, brothers and sisters—with what feel like first-hand details. They listen to the radio and find places to hide money and valuables, only to have the money spent and the valuables taken away. Ways to survive are found in the ghetto: the wealthy live better and make a profit, some Jews become police to, hopefully, live a little bit longer, and subversives distribute pamphlets and plan revolts. But all this is eventually for nothing. Death comes for them all, in the form of labor camps and trains to unspeakable places.
Szpilman escapes and begins living off the goodwill of the Polish and Hungarian undergrounds. He is shuttled from apartment to apartment, where he spends his days alone, living off charitable scraps of food, either opening the windows everyday to create the illusion that he has gone to work, or sitting soundlessly to preserve the ignorance of his neighbors. I can’t think of any other movie about the Holocaust in which food has been so crucial. Szpilman watches resistance fighters outside his window and regrets that he does not join them, even if only to die. But even the plans of the underground are eventually wasted, and in the film’s final act he finds himself wandering through snow and bombed-out buildings, jaundiced, mangy, ragged, and hobbling. He cries once during “The Pianist,” great, heartbroken sobs without regard for whomever sees him, and in the end we see him smile, genuinely, but touched with unresolved melancholy.
Szpilman is played by Adrien Brody, a not very well-known actor, now up for an Oscar. He has worked with Spike Lee in “The Summer of Sam,” and was one of Malick’s troops in “The Thin Red Line,” playing Corporal Most-of-My-Scenes-Got-Cut. He has giant, expressive eyes that remind us of a young Al Pacino crossed with a basset hound. He plays Szpilman not with tics, mannerisms, or speeches, but as a figure of enormous sympathy. He is described as one of the greatest piano players in the world, but we like him even more because he is completely nonchalant, almost embarrassed about his talent. He is businesslike as he performs, because he is a man that is aloof and keeps his own counsel. Unlike so many film biographies about musicians, he is never swept up by his music, except when he is literally playing to save his life. Yet he clearly loves the piano, and he loves Poland, both with a wordless love. He is asked, what are you going to do after the war? Play the piano on Warsaw radio, he says.