The Pianist
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Movie Reviews of The Pianist
Movie Review: Survival Story
Summary: 5 Stars
Roman Polanski's The Pianist is the real life story of Wladyslaw Szpilman who was a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland. Adrien Brody plays Szpilman and he gives a star-making performance. Szpilman is a concert pianist who plays on Polish radio and as the film begins he is playing on the radio when the area of Warsaw the station is in is bombed. The Szpilman family is defiant at first towards the news of the German occupation, but then like all Jewish families, they are forced to follow the strict rules the Nazis set forth regarding Jews. They are made to move from their spacious and homey apartment into a [cramped], run down space in the designated Jewish ghetto. The family struggles for money, but Wladyslaw is still able to play piano in a Jewish restaurant for meager earnings. Eventually the family is in line to be sent to a concentration camp, but through sheer fate, Wladyslaw is pulled from the line boarding the train and is spared certain death. He then spends time working a slave laborer building the wall separating the Jewish section of Warsaw from the rest of the city. Again, he escapes through the gracious help of others and through the underground resistance is kept hid in an apartment away from detection. Although free from the ghetto, he is a prisoner in the apartment and at the mercy of others. He is facing starvation when he is forced to flee the apartment when it is bombed. He hides out in a hospital for a while and eventually ends up in the bombed out ruins of Warsaw. It is while he is hiding in the ruins that he again faces almost certain death when he is discovered by a German officer, Captain Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann). Hosenfeld speaks with him and asks what Szpilman's profession was and Szpilman replies he is a pianist. There happens to be a piano in the house and Hosenfeld makes Szpilman play. Szpilman plays a gorgeous piece and Hosenfeld is moved to spare Szpilman's life. He brings him food and when the Germans are retreating from the Russians, Hosenfeld gives Szpilman his coat to keep warm. It is the exchange between Hosenfeld and Szpilman that is the heart of the film and shows that despite the horror of war and the atrocities of the Nazis, that the true spirit of humanity can still shine through. Ironically, Szpilman survived the war and went on to continue his career as a pianist and Hosenfeld ended up a prisoner in a Russian war camp where he died several years after the war ended. Mr. Brody is incredible in his part. His facial expressions convey the sense of fear and hopelessness that Szpilman must have felt through his tragic journey. Never once does go over the top, it a truly genuine performance. Mr. Polanski also does a brilliant job of directing. He details the senseless brutality and omnipresence of the German occupation of Poland, but never sinks into gratuitous violence. The film was nominated for seven academy awards including Best Picture. Both Mr. Brody and Mr. Polanski scored unexpected, but richly deserved Oscars for Best Actor and Best Director respectively and Ronald Harwood won the film's third Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.Movie Review: Some lied when they vowed "Never Again"
Summary: 5 Stars
For the record, let me comment on Dennis Littrell on his same review of this film. I find his opening statement repulsive, as he used the persecution of Jews during WW II as an excuse to justify Zionist persecution against the Palestinians here. Littrell is solely wrong if he thinks The Pianist is a film of Jewish supremacy overcoming all odds. Adrian Brody commented that in Szpilman's book (which this film is based), he narrates his experiences in an objective view. There were not just evil Nazis running around persecuting Poles and Jews, but there good Poles and bad Poles, good Jews and bad Jews and even good Germans among Nazi ranks. Even Polanski allows this in his film, where poor and suffering Jews complain of rich and influential Jews doing nothing to allevate their suffering. You can see the extreme contrast of rich and poor gap where you see the Jews in the restaurant where Szpilman plays the piano and the streets where you can see corpses lying on street, victims of starvation.In the beginning of the film, the Germans have invaded Poland and the Szpilman family are adjusting their lives to the new ruling of the Nazi Germans. They find their living conditions deteriorate as they are hustled away from their comfortable home to Ghetto and finally to the "melting pot". We see two brothers conflicting with each other as Hendrik, Szpilman's brother did not like the way he supposedly grovel to the authorities and using his privilage as a famous pianist which many Jews may envy. Even Hendrik was ungrateful when his brother freed him from prison. "Are you mad?" Szpilman asked. Hendrik's reply was "That is also my business."
Szpilman's influence was so great that he was spared when his family was sent off to the gas chambers. He lost every one of his family and when he goes back to the Ghetto where virtually all Jews were wiped out, here is a man completely devastated. We see the second half of the movie being akin to The Fugitive where he wriggles away from the claws of ever-suspecting Nazis.
When caught by Captain Wilm Hosenfeld and asked to play the piano, he plays the piano for the first time in a few years he had to be in silence for fear of alerting those around him (in apartment where he lives, he cannot play the piano as to alert everybody around him that there is a hiding Jew). This is one of the most redemptive scenes in the history of film, Szpilman plays the Chopin's Ballade reflecting the ordeal he went through. It is akin to Furtwangler conducting the great Beethoven Ninth in 1942 with battlefield sounds heard from distant.
At this age, where we cannot foretell the conclusion to the Middle East conflict and Americans squandering up their operation in Iraq, the pathetic music of MTV is contrary to music in Szpilman's time. Great music can only be created with great suffering. Gustav Mahler said that if his life flows like a calm meadow, he would not have the ability to compose anything. The classical music age has lost it's Szpilmans, Furtwanglers, Menuhins and the like. When another horrific World War comes, will there be another artist like Szpilman? Time can only tell.
Movie Review: Magnificent Recreation Of An Amazing Personal Journey!
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the most magical aspects of movie making can be found in the rare occasion when such a dramatization of a best-selling book results in an equally spellbinding film. Of course, the fact that it was Academy Award winning director Roman Polanski chosen to direct the project was a critical choice in bringing this shattering story of a man who found his humanity in classical music even in the midst of the Nazi takeover of Poland during World War Two to the screen. Given Mr. Polanski's personal experience as a Holocaust survivor, he has an exceptionally well-hewn capability to recreate all the sights, sounds, and sensibilities of the times to the movie with loving accuracy. In so doing he has created a modern masterpiece along the lines of such similar treatments of the period as Stephen Spielberg's "Schindler's List". Yet, while Spielberg apparently was striving to paint a broader-brushed treatment of the period and the horrific excesses of the Nazi treatment of the indigenous Jewish population during the war, Polanski concentrates much more exclusively on the personal journey of a solitary human being, in this case a pianist so singularly focused on his art and its centrality to his existence that he is often almost schizophrenic in his ability to ignore or block out all the mayhem, chaos and destruction that surrounds his every move. Against such a backdrop of the momentous events transpiring from the German army's invasion of Poland in September of 1939 through the end of the war is the pianist's story so marvelously told. His survival through the most barbaric of conditions imaginable is a testament both to his good luck and his hardy strength of will to survive for the sake of his blessed classical music.
Young actor Adrian Brody, in an Academy Award winning performance, both accurately and amazingly portrays the almost unbelievable events experienced by author/pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman as he makes his tortured way through the brutal gauntlet of the Nazi killing machine bent on the systematic extermination through the combined strategies of enforced work regimes, slow starvation, and murder in the death camps. The protagonist survives through a combination of his own wits as well as through the unexpected and strictly forbidden assistance of others, many of whom literally risked their own safety and lives by reaching out to aid him.
Polanski puts a human face on the Germans as well, showing at one point how in the midst of the unspeakable horror many of his colleagues were visiting on the Polish Jews and gypsies, even an officer in the Wehrmacht could be willing to risk his own safety to assist the pianist. The cinematography is remarkable, with a superb depiction of the massive destruction that modern war brings in its wake. The overshots of a totally destroyed Warsaw is a graphic demonstration of such total devastation on a scale so unimaginable that it would be otherwise difficult to grasp either intellectually or emotionally. This is a film that belongs in any serious film fan's library, and one I can heartily recommend for all but the youngest viewers. Enjoy!
Movie Review: Roman Polanski's The Pianist: Survival of The Human Soul
Summary: 5 Stars
The Pianist is a film about the tenacity of the human spirit against extreme, inhumane adversity- in this case the shamefully senseless, brutal Nazi holocaust under Adolph Hitler that targeted the Jews in Europe during WW2, where inhumanity in the form of vicious anti-semitism and the iron fist of political repression was the order of the day, and where opponents of the regime and others were also hunted and tormented way beyond any semblance of reason.
Survival on the part of the pianist represents the survival of a culture, indeed of human culture itself, despite the horrors that the young, gifted Wladyslaw Szpilman witnesses and suffers at the hands of the Nazis and their occupation while the rest of his family, along with millions of others, suffer even worse fate: brutal demise in the Nazi death camps.
Miraculously, our hero survives with his humanity intact, though he is tested almost to the breaking point by the occupying forces.
Polanski's legendary "black humor--" the cryptic sleight-of-hand that made previous horror films like Rosemary's Baby grotesquely amusing as well as terrifying-- is in this film deftly stripped by Polanski of all potentially mean, caricatural overtones to reveal only the stark, brutal absurdity of a real time and place in history that has truly gone stark-raving mad.
It is a place and time where the mere sight of a German soldier's coat after the end of the occupation ignites the fears of the terrified, shell-shocked Polish townspeople before they realize its wearer is Polish; where a gentle, young piano player, who carries culture inside his very soul, is reduced to a frightened, hungry but incredibly human animal trying desperately to open a can of water with a fire poker in a shelled-out, abanonded apartment and explains to the German soldier that he was in former times a pianist. This gifted musical artist has lost his entire family, most of his friends to the occupation and repression and much of his dignity, but his soul and his musical prowess remain intact.
Somehow, there is still a piano, despite the wiping out of all other remnants of culture in occupied Poland during the war and holocaust. The human spirit survives in the form of Wladyslaw Szpilman who plays the piano. Polanski pays homage as well to the decency of those courageous people who helped hide the hunted, terrified, brutalized Jews, at tremendous risk, even peril, to their own lives, and to the uprisings on the part of the courageous Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Polanski portrays an evil regime that is incapable of accomplishing total enslavement of the heart and mind of one of its soldiers-- a shred of humanity ultimately shines through the darkness. As such, The Pianist represents hope, for humanity as a positive force rather than a purely destructive one. Polanski shows how human beings contain all the possibilities large and small for goodness as well as evil, but in this film, when all is said and done, it is the former that ultimately triumphs.
Movie Review: Best Holocaust Survival Film Since "Schindler's List."
Summary: 5 Stars
Not since "Shindler's List (1993) has such a poignant tale of Holocaust survival been brought to the screen. The team of Roman Polanski (Director) and Ronald Howard (screenplay) have faithfully adapted Wladyslaw Szpilman's touching memoir to produce one of the most realistic human dramas in recent years. Polanski's own recollections of his childhood spent in the Cracow ghetto are added to Howard's screenplay. The result is a brilliant and artistic testimony to the human spirit's will to survive. Adrien Brody plays Szpilman, an accomplished pianist from a well-to-do Jewish family in Warsaw. He is playing over the Polish radio station when the Nazis conquer the city in September 1939. Forcefully moved into the Warsaw Ghetto, Szpilman is spared the fate of his family who are loaded into cattle cars and "relocated" to the concentration camp at Treblinka. With the help of others, Szpilman escapes the ghetto and goes into hiding. He is hidden by a close knit group of Polish gentiles who risk certain death if they are caught. Szpilman is nearly starved to death while locked in a flat when a shady accomplice sells Szpilman's food ration on the black market. Szpilman watches helplessly from his perch while the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is quelched and the city turned into a smoldering ruin. Forced to live the existence of a rat, burrowing through the gutted city in search of food, Szpilman is saved by Hauptmann (Captain) Wilm Hosenfeld, like Schindler, a good German. Ironically, Szpilman is nearly shot by the Russians at war's end because he is wearing the officer's great coat Hosenfeld had given him to keep warm. The human will to survive in the most horrible circumstances is the film's central theme. The ability to keep one's humanity and moral integrity under such conditions was the true test for Szpilman. It was his love of music, that flowed through his veins when nutrients could not that saved his soul from crumbling like the city walls around him. Besides the horrible atrocities committed by the Nazis, Polanski displays the darker side of non-Germans as well. The Jewish police and Polish Militia, who brutally beat Jews and herded them onto awaiting transports are accurately portrayed. With the exception of one neighbor who tries unsuccessfully to turn Szpilman into the Nazis, all the other Polish gentiles depicted in the film are sympathetic to the Warsaw Jews. Anti-Semitism was equally as rampant a problem in Poland as in the rest of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps Polanski was trying to remain loyal to Szpilman's perspective, but a stronger dose of Polish anti-Semitism would have seemed more believable. On the whole, The Pianist is a wonderful film. The set design and wardrobe are authentic down to the finest detail. Every scene is a gem. The acting job by Brody and supporting cast are superb and the soundtrack hauntingly beautiful. The DVD's behind the scenes extras are a fine tribute to Polanski's artistry. I rented this DVD, now I have to own it. Five stars and highly recommended.