The Pianist
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Movie Reviews of The Pianist
Movie Review: the transformation of the holocaust given new breath
Summary: 5 Stars
having grown up in the shadow of the second world war; holocaust, anti-semetism, palestine, the 'bomb' and it attendants--shelters, drills,civil defense, and stories of the glories of great war--this film measures up to the idea of its totalist destruction as we watch Poland be occupied, the ghetto established, then destroyed, and its it aftermath, warsaw and poland left in ruins unknown to us only now by a vivid comparison of our visual images of September 11. The reality of the set, and the recent events of september 11, still somehow an illigitimate descendant of the great world war--plagued me so vividly the fist time i watched the film, that i was not able to fully appreciate the performance of its lead actor, Adrian Brody, and watch in detail, as the transformation of a human being into less than unfolds before our eyes as a result of hatred at its zenith. Again, i watched the film, and again, it seemed so much the same painful recognitions of what we now know about Holocuast, that i was unable to add any further revelations about its shape until i began watching the third, fourth ,and fifth time. slowly , but surely, what i began to see emerge, was exactly how it must have felt to those held captive, enslaved, tortured and killed over the rising political period in Germany, from well before the war, and until first ending when the Allies began the liberation of Europe. I would like to say that it matters how much one knows about the Holocaust, but it doesn't--it is essential in its complete succintness--it tells the tale. That it takes only one chapter of the war, that of the occupation of Poland, the Ghetto and the Uprising, the story of the Pianist itself, and his family; then the everyperson caught in the spiderweb of nazism, is a complete tale.
At first, i felt the Pianist to be a arrogant man, one whom could not see the dangers of the world, whom deliberately ignored the world around him; only later on, did i come to understand, that in a world of such hostility, such a skin can make the world bearable, even liveable, even palpable to career, marriage, family, and community. This was whom the Pianist was, as he began his walk to the ghetto with his family that day, on October 31, 1941. It is painful to watch him become more and more disintegrated--i want the arrogant, playful, talented Pianist to return--i want him to stop this, and stand up again. As i watch him become smaller and more invisible, i begin to realize that the Pianist has learned, how to go into hiding with himself; thus , his seemingly amazing ability to hide from the Germans while in their midst. this is the lesson he learned in order to survive. the can of food, becomes food--not its diminished form--the same as the last shared meal the family has together while awaiting their yet unknown fate.
we hear plenty of what it was to survive in the camps; those too, are stories worthwhile, and eternal--we know what it was for anne frank and her family to survive, but we know little about the many others that hid during the war, both Jewish and Christian alike--it is not the mainstream topic of the Holocaust.
the dreams i had as a child, about how it might be easy to survive in the post apolyptic world, was shaken, as i watched this; it is not as my dreams could see it--it was far more that we can even imagine--and that is the very sensibility that Polanksi injects into this movie throught his characters. Each one has their own statement about the survival of this particular end of the world--and it was indeed, the end. And by the end, i began to also comprehend that one singular trait mentioned over and over, in survival stories--that survival depends upon the patience of hope to once again be, combined with the strange twisted chances of surviving. there are no apologies for survival--there is, the feeling of celebration, more than once, in this movie, of striving to keep alive.
For its genre, it deserves its acclaim--it very patiently seduces the viewer into this world, and unfolds its secrets with delicacy, and efficacy of details and minutes and hours of the times. the scene describing how the star of david patch is to be constructed and worn, is one such fine example, among many in the film of watching an intimacy of survival in horror is given to us.
I would not have felt comfortable going to the theater for this movie--and while i missed seeing the sets and hearing the theater sound system--this was a movie best viewed at home, when i could take breaks, from feelings of despair, anger, and hopelessness that set in while viewing it. The very ability to extract such powerful emotions from within myself, intuited that very sensibility and and wonderful portrayal of this man's life during these years we are given privy to. This is a keeper, on the shelf, along with others, on the subject. I am hoping that there will be a study guide for this move, soon in print.
Movie Review: Polanski's Best Since "Chinatown"
Summary: 5 Stars
Wladyslaw Szpilman was having a happy enough life in Warsaw in 1939, making a living by playing the piano on the radio. Then the Nazi tanks rolled in and the next six years were very very desperate as the events of the holocaust unfolded. First, all kinds of laws came into effect restricting the movement and activities of Jews. Jews must wear a Star of David, must walk in the gutter, are routinely brutalized. Then the Warsaw ghetto is constructed and Jews are walled off in a closed world of escalating brutality and starvation. Then they are told the majority of them will be deported, taken to places they are told are "labour camps" but which they are beginning to realize are something must uglier... Szpilman escapes this fate though he must watch his entire family taken away to their deaths. He is put in a work group, labouring in the city outside the ghetto. He then escapes out into the city where he is helped out by friends and resistance workers including Dorota, a young non-Jewish Pole he had courted before the ghetto was built, and her husband. From the window of the room he is hiding in he watches the 1943 uprising of the survivors of the ghetto. (Of course it fails and they are all killed.) Then abandoned by the man who was meant to be helping him he is relocated to another room elsewhere right opposite the Nazi police station. There he stays until the water supply is cut off and the building is bombed and burned out by the Germans. Now altogether alone, he hides out in the ruins of Warsaw and, as the Russians advance against the collapsing German army, he is helped to survive the closing stages of the occupation by German officer Wilm Hosenfeld. That is the story of this movie and it's a true story taken from the memoir Szpilman wrote soon after the war. It also owes a good deal to the memory of its director as Polanski, a Polish Jew, himself survived the Holocaust as a child. It's a wilfully unflashy piece of cinema where everything is extremely understated. The performances are quietly excellent. Brody's in particular is superb but creeps up on one only very slowly. There is no score, no incidental music and music is only heard when it is being played for real as part of the action (except in one scene where it is very pointedly not being played.) It is as if Polanski wants to present these events as plainly and straightforwardly as possible and have us respond to them as directly as possible. For the most part this strategy pays off and the film is an extraordinary and moving experience.
The most extraordinary and unforgettable parts are also the parts that involve the greatest artistic risk on Polanski's part when Szpilman, after escaping the ghetto, is completely alone is a bare room with nothing to do except sit around and wait, hoping that maybe someone will bring him some more food before he starves, watching from his window events in the street at whose significance he can only make frightened guesses as months and months pass. The risk with theses scenes of course is that they could so easily have been just boring and the temptation Polanski resists splendidly is that of being driven by anxiety on that score to sex these scenes up in ways that would have killed off their effectiveness and their integrity: adding a bit of music, perhaps, or a voiceover or cutting into Szpilman's narrative with scenes from elsewhere telling, say, Dorota's story too. But no: here as elsewhere, Polanski sticks rigorously to relaying events as Szpilman experienced them and eschews any other perspective. And in fact these scenes are the triumphant reverse of boring as is the whole movie.
One thing troubled me. This film is always sold as a story of how Szpilman is saved by his love of music and it's hope-inducing dramatic centre is, I think, intended to be the scene amongst the ruins of Warsaw when Szpilman has just been discovered by Hosenfeld and, asked to play the piano to him, proceeds to do so. This scene is intended to be moving and it is but it's also surely a little disturbing. It's not entirely clear whether we are intended to think that this is the point where Szpilman is being saved by his love of music and if it is thereby implied that, if he had been a less accomplished pianist, or if he had been a fishmonger, say, or a dentist, Hosenfeld would not have bothered with him. I'm sure that's not the idea and yet there is a deeply troubling sense in this scene that we are unsure to what extent Szpilman is being tested out to ascertain if he is, in some sense, worth saving...
In any case, this is an extraordinary film, certainly Polanski's best movie since "Chinatown" and a spectacular return to form after the altogether unremarkable "Ninth Gate".
Movie Review: A rivetting and disturbing anti-war masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
The rubric on the DVD I purchased stated that "This [...] film follows [the pianist's] journey of survival with the unlikely help of a sympathetic German officer". I had imagined that the pianist in question would have been playing in some kind of café or bar throughout the five years that Warsaw was occupied by the Nazis, with this "sympathetic German officer" being a keen listener and showing his admiration for the pianist's marvelous playing abilities.
Whilst my speculation about the quasi-friendship was hopelessly wide of the mark, the last speculation was almost exactly on the spot, yet the officer (Thomas Kretschmann) sees the utterly scruffy, bedraggled and starving Szpilman (Adrien Brody) hiding in an attic in a devastated part of the Pole's home city barely weeks before the Germans retreated west before the advancing Soviets.
The state in which the officer found Szpilman conveyed in an unforgettable way the utter privations experienced by just one man in his bid to avoid being shot on sight, if not dragged off to the extermination camps, which would have happened earlier in the war had not one Polish Jewish policeman not physically dragged Szpilman out of the line of would-be deportees to Treblinka, since he knew who he was.
Seen from the perspective of one Jewish man, the Nazi policy regarding their treatment of the Jews is crystal-clear: ghettoization and extermination. Even the scenes depicting the so-called "Gentile street" running through the Jewish ghetto are powerful as a reminder of how physically cut off the Jews were from the rest of Varsovian society and of how utterly demoralized and ostracized the Jews were forced to feel as a people. How ironic, indeed, that a wall would divide the capital of the (then former) Nazi regime for 28 years, albeit along political, not racial, lines.
As might be expected, there are scenes designed deliberately to shock and appal - as well as remind the audience of just how brutally the Nazis, in the form of the S.S., treated the Jews. Who can forget the one where the old man is thrown to his death from his wheelchair from an upper floor of the building opposite where the Szpilmans were living, and the one where an S.S. man picked out people from a work party, which included Szpilman in its ranks, and summarily executed them. This illustrated just how hard-core Nazis dealt with those whom Nazi racial theory regarded as the Untermenschen ("sub-humans").
The conditions in which Szpilman found himself after escaping from the ghetto, destroyed in April 1943, were vastly different from before, as he found himself alone, having to live in a flat locked from the outside to avoid snoopers taking too close a look. When the Warsaw Uprising starts in August 1944, Szpilman is forced to run for his life and take refuge wherever he can as the Nazis snuff out all resistance, killing almost every Pole in sight. It was only at this point that the Kretschmann character, a captain in the army and not the S.S., helps him, but only after he manages to prove he is a pianist in spite of his utterly pathetic and miserable condition. Szpilman manages to survive the scenes of harrowing death and destruction, even if his benefactor was inevitably captured by the Soviet Army and fated to die in a POW camp.
Overall, "The Pianist" is as much an anti-war film as it is a war film, given that the aggressors had all the power at their disposal to do whatever they wished to their unarmed victims, although the will to fight on the part of the Jews is also highlighted, not just during the Uprising. Many of the film's scenes were shot not just in Warsaw, but also in two cities in Germany. The images are highly disturbing almost right from the very start, and that was the intention of Roman Polanski, who won the Academy Award for Best Director, for whom this movie was said to be "his most personal" on account of his own memories of war-torn Warsaw.
Adrien Brody gives a performance which richly deserved his Academy Award for Best Actor, as he immerses himself in the character, sharing whatever joys and pain came both his way and the way of his relatives and friends, and stoically displaying the emotions that one would readily expect in such situations as Szpilman manages to survive, his life intact, ready to resume his career, albeit in a Poland that had been changed irrevocably. English actors Frank Finlay, Emilia Fox and Maureen Lipman co-star with Brody and give sterling performances.
Movie Review: Passafist Dissects The Pianist using Castaway
Summary: 5 Stars
Hollywood [Bad]! I have just witnessed a cinematic masterpiece, a film that is about characters and events, that's lyrical and beautiful and all I can think of after it is how much of a tool Tom Hanks is. Why is it that after experiencing Roman Polanski's THE PIANIST I can only think of Robert Zemeckis's CAST AWAY? It's a really an eerie feeling, but go with me for a little while. Maybe my ranting will begin to make sense.THE PIANIST is the powerful and lyrical life story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrian Brody, Summer of Sam), a Jew living in Poland during World War II. It follows him from a peaceful life as a piano player on polish radio, to the ghetto's of Warsaw, to hiding in empty apartments, and all the while dreaming of life as it once was. CASTAWAY is the story of Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks, The Money Pit) a FedEx employee that gets trapped on a deserted island and in the end talks to volleyball.
How are these two stories similar? They're both about men trying to make through unbelievable circumstances and how they must do it alone. One takes the Hollywood approach, where everything is ambiguously tied up at the end. The other takes a more lyrical approach, where a man returns to what he does best. The Pianist takes the lyrical approach and in the end is more successful a story.
Brody is fantastic. For much of the film he's teetering on that thin line between madness and sanity. Nothing more telling than the scene, in which, Szpilman, whom hasn't eaten in days, finds an unopened jar of pickles. In his attempt to open that jar he is confronted by his worst fear, a German guard standing before him. In a Hollywood film, this scene would be about Szpilman breaking free and running away. But in the PIANST it about him longing for that can of pickles. When he picks it up off the floor he holds onto it for dear life. If his life is not taken by the guard he's got to eat so he's not letting go. It's a small moment that is really powerful.
I contrast that with Tom Hanks teetering on that thin line as well. He has a friend, he talks to a volleyball. But this relationship is far different. This relationship is about giving the actor something to talk to. The most dramatic moment in this film is when he losses the Volleyball. Problem is the film suggests that the volleyball is a character and not a need, like food. This moment is so huge it spoils what should be a moment of discovery for the character. The moment when he can go on without his crutch, but all the audience cares about is a stupid volleyball.
The final moments in THE PIANIST are also small but have strong impact. Moments before the credits roll we see Szpilmann sitting in an open field, wondering what to do next. It then cuts to him doing what he's always done. He's beaten those who have tried to keep him down. It's encouraging but the music doesn't have to swell, and the violins don't have to play. It's a small intimate moment. The scene does not force emotion, but there is much there. It plays with life the way life really is, when the battle is over, we may have changed but we still sometimes go back to what we are good at. He one tha battle and he can play again.
CASTAWAY puts the hero right in the middle of a literal crossroads. What should he do next? The camera circles around him, and he walks down a road. But while Both moments are very similar, this moment is over sentimental. It forces emotions and it fails to move you, you don't really care what road he choses. It kind of diminishes his battle. He has nowhere to go and I'm sure none of us want to follow.
In film sometimes plot is inconsequential. I would have loved to have been trapped on an island with Wladyslaw Szpilman as much as I didn't care about Chuck Noland on an island, and well he'd probably wind up gassed in a polish concentration camp had he come up in that time. That's what is great about Brody's performance, he is in every scene of this movie, and fills the screen with a character of depth and strength. Hanks fills the screen with a character of no depth and mostly surface strength.
It's amazing that I could compare two completely opposite films and explain how one fails and the other one works. But I have found a new film I can call a favorite and another film I can never rent again. One is powerful, the other dull and yet they have two characters that can be very similar.
Do yourself a favor and rent THE PIANST, you won't be disappointed.
Movie Review: Best Film of 2002
Summary: 5 Stars
The New York Times recently published an article that hypothetically asked if there were too many recent documentary and feature films made about the Holocaust. The answer was an obvious no, but it does stand to reason that films about the Holocaust have become a genre that is all their own. And, like any genre, there are good movies and lousy ones. The Holocaust itself is such an emotionally loaded subject that it's difficult to dismiss any material based on it. And that's why there is a perceived glut of Holocaust movies out, because all of them are taken seriously (except maybe "Jakob the Liar").The Holocaust remains a fascinating subject for the simple reason that it happened. It is, along with slavery, the darkest chapter of recent human history, and it cannot be undone. It cannot be reversed. There is a finality to the events that remains terribly difficult to deal with, and it's what ultimately makes Roman Polanski's The Pianist such a devastating experience.
It's curious that Polanski, who is himself a survivor of the Holocaust (he lost all but one member of his immediate family when he was just a boy), would fashion the Pianist as such an unsparing and unsentimental look at what happened to Polish Jews during World War II. Then again, it makes perfect sense. Polanski knows what an unforgiving time that was, and he refuses to sugarcoat it. Not that a movie like Schindler's List wrongfully dabbled in adding extra melodrama to the era, but The Pianist is important because it seems to get the true emotions of its characters just right. You feel like the story happened exactly this way in real life. Polanski also filters the story solely through the point-of-view of Wladislaw Szpilman (played by Adrien Brody, whose portrayal merits adulation beyond the Oscar he has already received). He does not try and make Szpilman's story a microcosm of every Jew's story. Nor does he try and make Szpilman an overly herioc figure. He is simply a normal man who miraculously survives and cannot explain why.
The fact that Szpilman survives the Holocaust makes The Pianist riveting as a story, but the idea that he had to do it in such complete and total isolation (the latter portion of the film plays almost like the movie Cast Away) is what makes it doubly powerful. If this is what Szpilman had to endure in order to survive, imagine what others had to go through. And is it a better fate to survive such atrocities rather than perish? Polanski provides no answer, and that's why the film unsettled many who saw it.
It would be foolish in discussing The Pianist and its accolades to not acknowledge the controversy surrounding Polanski himself. Regardless of people's opinion of Polanski (and it can range from admiration to disgust, sometimes from the same person), The Pianist stands alone as an important work of art. And, the fact that Hollywood actually gave Polanski an Oscar in absentia for the movie speaks more to its undeniable power than it does any kind of perceived liberal favoritism (though there's plenty of that to go around in the film industry). Polanski clearly saw a parallel between his childhood memories and the story of Szpilman, and it shows all over the movie. It makes The Pianist his own, but not in any kind of self-indulgent manner.
Polanski also saw something in Brody that must have reminded him of himself. Brody, who had gone relatively unnoticed despite his wealth of talent, here gives a performance so complete it's hard to imagine that he is in real life just a kid from Brooklyn. Thanks to Brody, some portions of the movie that could come off as contrived (in particular the piano-playing scene in a destroyed Warsaw ghetto), instead feel real and are completely heartbreaking. Other actors are effective here, but Brody is the film, and the job he does is nothing short of amazing.
Roger Ebert has said numerous times that no good film is depressing. I disagree with that (you won't be partying after watching Schindler's List). But great, emotionally difficult films like The Pianist are far too rewarding to avoid. It is easily the best film of last year, and perhaps the best dramatized Holocaust film ever made. Art like this makes the words "Never Forget" a whole lot easier to remember.