The Pianist
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Movie Reviews of The Pianist
Movie Review: a personal story of Holocaust
Summary: 5 Stars
I am very proud reviewing this movie by the fellow Pole Roman Polanski. Not because he's a Pole - I always thought he's an OK. director, but for me never outstanding. I liked his early movies the most: fresh and thrilling "Knife In Water" made in Poland in early sixties, sinister and fascinating "Rosemary's Baby" with beautiful score by Komeda. What he did later I considered, more or less, a relative letdown. Even acclaimed "Chinatown" was Ok., but still a 4-star movie for me. So I did not expect anything brilliant from "The Pianist", especially that, for some reason, first reviews in Poland were lukewarm. The movie was said to be too straightforward, too conservative for this contemporary director, too sentimental etc.So I went to the theater with some anxiety; happily from the very beginning all fears were gone. All critical objections turned out to be ridiculous; all listed weaknesses turned out to be strengths.
Starightforward? Yes. But man, it is the true and simple story of survival. The movie is quite exactly based on memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, famous Polish pianist of Jewish origin, not only great interpreter of Chopin, but also great personality, full of humour, intelligence and warm hearted. This is a very personal story from the beginning to the very end. Moving and epic pictures of war and holocaust were somehow in the background, seen from Szpilman's window when he was moved from one hidden flat to another. And it's the main advantage here - a perfect balance between personal and general. That makes "The Pianist" even more moving than "Schindler's List" (also superb film), which concentrated more on paradocumentary, epic details. War, from a personal point of view is a tragedy, for the history it is only statistics. The story here was so personal and simple that I was moved to tears in some moments, the scene near the end when a German officer found Szpilman in a deserted, burned house (there were only ruins all around) and asked him to play piano... When the beautiful melody started I could not stop tears... Funny, isn't it?
For the same reasons I find accusations that "The Pianist:" is too conservative or sentimental even more ridiculous. Polanski was certainly a great innovator. Most of his films are based on weird, somehow artificial plots delivered in a weird way. Modernistic filmmaking fit these plots very well. But here, I feel it was the true story of another man, fellow Jew and fellow Pole; the story deeply hidden in Polanski's mind and heart. It's like we say "I love you" - we use the simplest language known since the beginning of humanity...
Nobody moved in the theater till last writings appeared on the screen, nobody talked, people went out silent. We could taste the real great art. I am very happy the Academy gave the makers their due, I only can't understand why the jury preferred the lightweight and forgettable "Chicago" over this. Maybe (my guess) only to satisfy Hollywood which produced no real gem this year ;-)
Igor Kurowski
Movie Review: This is a keeper. Required viewing!
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought, another stereotypical albeit well-baked movie about a minority group (Jewish) in the throes of the holocaust. How big a deal could that be?Boy, did I underestimate Polanski's (China Town, Ninth Gate) mettle as a story teller! Half-way through the movie, you'll be far too immersed in the vein of the story to worry about your preconceived notions about an archetypic war movie.
Theme-wise, this is a story of Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a Jewish pianist who is ghettoised when the Nazis invade Poland. A frail and delicate man, he is ill-equipped to cope with the rigours imposed, or the political shenanigans his colleagues employ to try and gain favour. His music is his continual companion and his sole retreat from the misery. All the elements of a WWII movie are smooshed in -- the litany of Nazi cruelty, the change in the Jews from helpless victims to freedom fighters, the triumph of the human spirit etc etc. So those of you anticipating some sort of action and suspense won't be disappointed. But where the movie transcends expectations is its superlative control of the characters -- Germans or Jews -- as flesh-and-blood human beings, highlighting their fears and the motivations behind why they did what they did.
The Pianist potrays a vivid barbaric spectre of WW II as poignant as La Vita è bella or Sophie's Choice, as visually stunning as Saving Private Ryan or Platoon, and as emotionally epic as Full Metal Jacket or Schindler's List. IN fact, more like La Vita è bella or Sophie's Choice perhaps, this is a deeply personal narrative that real and genuine people can relate to and will treasure for the lessons that may be draw from it.
I appreciated its honesty -- Polanski refuses to trade on sentimentality to achieve its power. Szpilman's reluctance to let us in on his thoughts about his family, friends, and the people who helped keep him alive make him appear aloof, but the reality is so far beyond normal comprehension that emotional numbness may be the only appropriate response. When Brody finds a kindred soul in the German Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann) who discovers his hiding place, however, we are finally drawn into the humanity of his character. It is here that the soulful music of Chopin's Nocturne in C played by Szpilman in a hollowed-out apartment in the midst of desolation lends a bizarre beauty to the unfathomable night. An important message, this -- not all the Germans were evil.
While you may occasionally feel that Polanski was a bit too obvious with the good/bad personifications (e.g., the evil Germans were all rugged & scowling whereas the protagonists heroic underground rebel Jews were all fairly handsome and jovial), you'll nevertheless finish the movie with some very beautiful imagery that'll linger in your mind for a while, in fact if my weak-kneed experience is any indication, perhaps in your eyes too. And what an incredibly ironic timing it will be given the supposed "shock and awe" we are being served in Iraq as I write.
Movie Review: The Robinson Crusoe of the Nazi Holocaust.
Summary: 5 Stars
The Pianist is an amazing film on all counts and could well be the best film from Polanski and his most personal work to date. The best way to describe The Pianist is by sticking Robinson Crusoe in the middle of a Nazi Holocaust.Holocaust films are always striving to get at you emotionally by creating good guy bad guy type scenarios. The truth is that The Pianist is not really concentrating too much on delivering a Holocaust movie. Instead it aims for telling the tale of a feeble piano player trying to survive Polish Nazi occupation. The premise is a simple one. The Pianist is not like his brothers, sisters or friends who are all actively seeking ways to rebel against the Nazis. Instead he is just trying to stay alive in order to engage in his one passion in life - playing the piano.
Basically the film starts with Wladyslaw Szpilman (An amazing Adrian Brody!) learning with his family that the Nazis are making decrees against the Jews. You see the elevating intensity of a rich family suddenly being relocated to a confined Jewish district and then the horrors start to build up from simple street provocations to full out mass murders in public view. The buildup is powerful and horrifying. The things you see in this film will make you angry and mad, but the Holocaust is not really what is at the heart of this film.
Wladyslaw is just a Piano player and can do very little to stop what is going on. He does not wish to join any revolution and tries to stay out of the way being hospitable and polite when he can. As the world collapses around him he finds his life spared from the concentration camps only to be catapulted from the frying pan into the fire as he tries to survive in solitary either with the help of Jewish sympathizers or by living among the rumbled ruins in search of food. Seeing the world through the eyes of Wladyslaw is what this film is all about and Brody gives his best performances when he is alone with nobody to talk too or anything to say. Just seeing him stagger around in search of food is like nothing you have seen before or will see again.
Sure the encounter with the Nazi commander at the end is a little hard to believe and it does border on the fantastic as if to create a musical plot twist for our pivotal character but then again it is based on a true story and these things did happen so it is believable in an unlikely sort of way.
At its core, The Pianist is a survival movie about one man trying to last among the rubbles and ruins. At times it is surreal and at others it is devastatingly emotionally potent. This is one of the best films of the 21st century and you should certainly not miss out on seeing this drama. The set designs, plot, script, costumes, acting and action sequences are all on top form. For realism it is simply unparalleled by any film of its kind.
Highly Recommended.
Movie Review: Is There More to Say? To This I Answer Affirmatively
Summary: 5 Stars
There are so many ways to review a film. So many angles, perspectives. Criticisms are as easy to find (Brody's long hair toward the end is not that convincing) as laurels (Polanski's brilliant use of original black and white footage (much viewable on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial website) of pre-war Warsaw integrated into the scenes of film--reconstructions, if you will.In all respects a brilliant film.
I will therefore focus on only one aspect. This is the encounter between Szpilman, the Pianist, and Wehrmacht Hauptmann des Reserves Wilm Hosenfeld (pulled from the Reserves out of wartime necessity), the man who provided the means for him to survive the few weeks left before the Red Army enters Warsaw, which, using Computer Graphic Imaging, is in color as startlingly real as the actual black and white photographs of the period--near total destruction and decimation of a great city.
That encounter, which of course one must live through the film to appreciate, is acted to perfection by Brody and Thomas Kretschmer, the German actor. I have before me an actual photograph of Captain Hosenfeld in 1940, having what appears to be a pleasant conversation with a Jew, on the street, in the snow, in Wegrow.
Hosenfeld was an unusual man, leaving behind many letters to home. He died in ingnominity in some Soviet prison camp--only 5,000 of some 90,000 Prisoners of War returned to Germany--a Holocaust unto itself about which we know little.
Hosenfeld was a Captain of Reserves, if anything, a rather stunning man in contrast to what we normally think of when we see the Wehrmacht officer in uniform, the Reichsadler (Reich Eagle holding the Swastika, or Hackenkreuz in German), prominently over the right upper breast pocket of the Waffenrock (four pocket tunic).
Even in the winter of 1939/1940 (the photo is in a recent German book, "Retter in Uniform"--Rescuers in Uniform--showing Hosenfeld and Schindler to be hardly unique. Schindler a war profiteer who seemingly regains, or assumes, his humanity in Schindler's list....Hosenfeld, a busy leader organizing retreat who can take the time to listen to Szpilman play, and to say ironically, with a smile--good name for a Pianist. In German, it would be Spielman--one who plays. These contrasts--the emaciated Szpilman, the robust, dutiful if resigned Hosenfeld, make the film unforgettable--you will not have to worry about placing it in a "favorite's" place. You can never forget the moment when Kretschmer, as Hosenfeld, says. "Speil was"--play something.
This film lasted, possibly, four weeks in Austin, Texas, at one, two, maybe three theaters, often nearly empty. I recommend it most highly, for its tragic and ecstatic moments, one of the most dramatic being Szpilman's ultimately failed search for Hosenfeld. Mr. Polanski has not lost his filmmaking touch.
Movie Review: Polanski opened the window
Summary: 5 Stars
"The pianist" is a true story of the survival of a Jewish pianist-Wladyslaw Szpilman during the Nazi occupation in Warsaw, Poland. Thinking of survival, we may hope all charactors we love in the movie could be alive at the end like many melodramas, but in "The pianist", Wladyslaw Szpilman and his parents, sole brother and two sisters did not all pass the brutal era. He (Wladyslaw Szpilman) was the only survivor of his family. The miracle here is about not only a attraction of this movie, but also a truth in the history that about half a million Jews were forced to live in Warsaw ghetto from October 1939 only 20 kept alive when Russian soldiers came to Warsaw in January 1945. One of them was Wladyslaw Szpilman.The movie begins with a piano melody of Chopin played by Wladyslaw Szpilman as live music for a Polish radio in 1939. Suddenly the music was stopped by the bombing of Nazi. What happened next in this movie is a chain of cruelty, both visual and mental; a Jewish old disabled man was thrown down from the balcony of building simply because he was sitting on his wheelchair when he was ordered to stand up by German soldiers, a Jewish woman was shot on the head because she asked a German soldier where she would be brought to, and Jews were roughly paired to dance in front of German soldiers for entertaining them. And what about our hero of the movie? he escaped from place to place under the help of different people; Jews, Polish and even a Nazi officer. What we see is the scene of being survive under the brutality. Our hero did all he can to find food like an animal, he was keeping perfectly quite when he saw the killing on the streets through the window. At the end, when the whole city was turned into rubbles, he had to escape again, this time he was saved by a Nazi German, more acurately, by playing piano for him. The German officer gave him food and left him his coat when Germans evacuated from Warsaw, by the way, our hero was almost killed by Russians when they misjudged him as a German for wearing that coat.
The director of the movie-Roman Polanski made this movie that differs from other WWII holocaust tragedies. There is neither tear-jerking music like "Schindler's list" and "Life is beautiful" nor passionate ending speech like Chaplin's "The great dictator". What we can see is more like a documentary feature. Polanski told us this incredible story but avioded to crank up sentiment, he didn't provide the time for the audiences to tear. What I feel from this movie is to accept an unbelievable truth of survival happened in a such inhuman world. Polanski renovated holocaust movie by setting up a window for us, like the window through which Wladyslaw Szpilman saw the carnage. The director simply opened that for us to watch and understand the life and death of Jews in Warsaw ghetto.