The Pianist

Believe it or not, despite my last paragraph, this was written ages ago, soon after The Pianist was released on DVD. It seems like when one mentions "current events" as bad news, there is always an example one can point to. It is sadly inevitable. Wish it wasn't.

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002): I've been avoiding watching this like the plague, because when you get home from a long day at work the last thing you want to see is a "holocaust" movie. (In fact, now, I'm thinking "when WOULD be the best time to watch a holocaust movie?" and the answer I come up with is "BEFORE the next holocaust!" seeing as a little education about precedent might prevent the next one...) But since our current Netflix choices are The Pianist or The Constant Gardener, its a bit easier to choose which of the two depressing movies you want to take on. We went with Pianist, and now I regret putting it off.

Yes, it's about the Warsaw Ghetto. But it's also a terrific adventure/survival movie about a man used to the rarefied world of the arts—a luxury, truth be told—being forced to make life and death choices just in order to survive. 

It begins with Władysław Szpilman (Adrien Brody) performing a concert piece over the radio only to have the program interrupted by Nazi Germany bombing the city. The reaction among the populace is a typical one--great fear leavened by a hope for the best (with a cautious "it can't happen here" disbelief). France and England declare war on Germany, and, with help like that, the crisis can't last long. 

But, it does. It gets continually worse with the Polish government cooperating with the Nazis, the Russians presenting an opposing front within the nation, the Jewish population denied jobs and businesses, forced to wear identifying arm-bands, then segregated into the poorest sections of Warsaw.

When the Jews are rounded up to be sent to the Treblinka concentration camp, Wladyslaw is separated from his family by a sympathetic member of the Jewish Ghetto Police and forced into slave labor, while secretly working to smuggle weapons into the ghetto for a rumored uprising.

Wladyslaw manages to escape and for the next three years, with the help of sympathetic friends—and, unbelievably, even one German officer—he manages to eke out an existence during the occupation and war-time bombardments. *

That its a true story makes it even more remarkable and a testament to one's will to live. But its also one of Roman Polanski's best films--a straight ahead artful telling of the tale without blandishments or Polanski's usual tendency to throw in some frivolous garbage that devalues the piece. Brody is simply amazing in it (but "Man Alone" movies tend to bring out the best in actors—anyone remember Dr. Hang S. Noor in The Killing Fields? Both actors won Oscars for their respective roles), slowly losing the detached look in his eyes as his situation worsens and worsens. 

One can't help but flash on current events and how a populace can be fooled into thinking "But they wouldn't dare...." Give someone enough power, and they'll dare anything. With enough power, who's going to stop them? 

Well worth seeing if only as a cautionary tale.

* Polanski was undoubtedly drawn to the story as he did basically the same thing growing up in war-time Krakow. He tells of how his family was rounded up for the concentration camps and only surviving because his father shoved him out of line, saying "I don't know you! Get out of here!" He lived under a false identity in a series of foster homes and on his own throughout the rest of the war.