| THE PIANIST Rating:   Director: Roman Polanski Producers: Robert Benmussa, Roman Polanski, Alain Sarde Writer: Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman Director of Photography: Pawel Edelman Cast: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Maureen Lipman Visit the IMDB Page for full cast and crew |
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Review by: Memo
Salazar
12/10/02
There's an inherent problem with making a genre picture: the viewer draws upon the memories of every other movie (s)he's ever seen from that same category. For better or for worse, you can't watch a gangster film without tapping into your stereotypes of fat, angry Italians and stories of family revenge. Unfortunately, the Holocaust Film has become its own genre, complete with its own set of stereotypes and audience expectations: mean, cold-hearted Nazis; poor, persecuted Jews; freedom-fighting Americans. In the world of gangsters, such mythic exaggerations are part of the fun, but when it comes to a historical tragedy such as the Holocaust, an upsetting side-effect is the way we've become numb to the impact that such an event should have on us as viewers. Yeah, yeah -- concentration camps, people getting gassed, inhumanity at its best. We've seen it so many times, covered in Grade-A Hollywood cheese, that it's hard to react without a "been there, done that" attitude. Spielberg pretty much nailed the Hollywood Holocaust Ideal a few years back, so why would one of the world's greatest filmmakers dive into making yet another movie about a Jew surviving WWII?
Surely there must be more to it than the fact that Polanski himself went through this experience as a child, escaping the Jewish Krakow Ghetto through a hole in a wall over 60 years ago. The Pianist is based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's autobiography, written as soon as the war had ended, giving both the book (and the film) a freshness of detail that is sadly lacking in most Holocaust films. I'm not talking about historical detail like the color of the uniforms or the model of the rifles; The Pianist is full of the details of daily life; the small moments that most movies gloss over but Polanski is so good at capturing. The story is nothing you haven't heard before: a Jewish pianist, quite successful in pre-war Poland, loses everything -- family, career, everything -- when he becomes one of countless millions persecuted by the Nazis. We watch him survive, through luck and skill (more luck than skill), until that day we all know exists finally arrives: the end of the war. But forget the plot -- it's thankfully not the strength of the movie. What won this film the Palme d'Or at Cannes was the duet between Polanski and his quite-talented lead actor, Adrien Brody.
Brody's talent is already quite apparent in two previous films: Steven Soderbergh's greatest (and most-ignored) classic, the Depression-Era masterpiece King of the Hill, and Spike Lee's much-hated (but quite good) Summer of Sam. In both cases, Brody comes off like Nicholas Cage's smarter kid brother, with that same sleepy-eyed look but with a lot more cooking under the hood. Polanski needs no introduction, and though not all his films have been perfect, The Pianist showcases a master craftsman at complete ease with his subject. He provides Brody with a tactile version of 1940's Poland, rich in human detail, which Brody then uses as the backdrop to his own human devolution from a quiet, gentle intellectual, who was quite content to be a simple musician, to a wide-eyed, silent survivor, depending on the charity of Polish fans to keep himself from starving or getting caught. The drastic change in his appearance over the course of the film mirrors his internal one; by the time he emerges from the rubble of his Warsaw neighborhood wearing a Nazi officer's coat to greet the Russian army, he bears no resemblance to the man we met at the beginning of the film. Somehow, Polanski manages to make a WWII epic without being epic. This is the kind of film that gets better as the days go by, its small details slowly seeping back into your memory.
And that's where Polanski shines best: not in the action scenes of gunfire and persecution, gripping as they may be, but in the internal world he creates for us to wallow in. Remember that this is the guy that made Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, and Knife in the Water, three amazing examples of psychological drama and horror, free of gimmicks. The Pianist boasts little dialogue (which is good, since they decided to make this an English-speaking movie, which takes away from the realism of its surroundings), allowing many of the scenes to play out in real-time. Most films about the horrors of war bombard us with graphical overload: people getting gassed, soldiers getting blown to bits. The Pianist has a little of that, to be sure (it is a war movie, after all), but spends a lot more time in silence, as we watch Szpilman struggle to open a can of pickled vegetables or spend days holed up in an apartment, waiting for Polish guardians that may never come. By watching the scene slowly play itself out, we start to suffer along with this struggling pianist, tasting the claustrophobia the way only Polanski can serve it. He dips into his bag of tricks sometimes, employing techniques from previous films to draw us into the story: filming a scene from Szpilman's point-of-view, through a cracked window pane (blocking out our visibility as he did in Rosemary's Baby) or shoving a hand-held camera right in Brody's face to increase the tension (as he did to Faye Dunaway in Chinatown.)
But you don't have to be a film geek to appreciate what's going on. The greatest testament to The Pianist is the way it succeeds in seamlessly recreating an internal and external world through mood and pacing, rather than by merely retelling historical atrocities (an easy way to garner sympathy that Polanski mostly avoids). On top of this we have what may be the best example yet of CGI: a film where you never even notice it's there. It wasn't until the credits appeared, listing countless CGI artists, that the thought of computer effects ever crossed my mind. Finally, a movie that employs effects to improve the story, rather than the other way around. The Pianist should win some awards on that mere fact alone.
If the hype hasn't already started, it soon will. It will be easy for many to dismiss any awards this garners as another example of a movie mining familiar emotional territory to garner praise; resist such impulses. The Pianist is much better than it sounds on paper, and it succeeds not with the big but with the small. Anyone who places it in the same boat as Schindler's List is simply missing the point. As he did to film noir in Chinatown, Polanski is twisting a popular genre into a piece of personal expression. Not bad for an old dog who's been mostly ignored by America these last couple of decades.
(A Focus Features release. Opens in
New York and Los Angeles on December 27. Expands to more cities
at later dates.)
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