The Pianist
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.51 You Save: $10.47 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.64 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Pianist
Movie Review: Definitively an inspiring epic...
Summary: 5 Stars
'The Pianist' is definitively an inspiring epic that celebrates the tenacity and fortitude of the human spirit... It is a remarkable tale of human survival sensitively brought to life by Polanski... The film carries us to the horrible reign of terror, where condemned people wearing the emblem of humiliation and oppression, are deprived of their rights, their human values and dignity, before being shipped to 'labor camps.'
In Polanski's movie all the conventional elements of the drama are at peaks of excellence:
Family union: When a father has to bargain to buy a single piece of caramel and divide it in six pieces to share it with each member of his family...
Starvation: When a ghetto inhabitant assaults a helpless woman for a bowl of soup...
Confusion: When a distraught woman wails on a platform because she smothered the cries of her baby with her hand...
Love: When a young musician turns to his younger sister and utters with sad regret, "I wish I knew you better."
Survival: When one man observes the war through his hide-outs around the city...
Cruelty: When an old man in a wheelchair is thrown off the balcony by the Nazis because he failed to stand upon their entrance...
Fear: When a talented musician sits down at the old piano, and pretends to play his music, keeping his fingers flowing with control above the vertical ivories...
Discrimination: When bored Nazi guards entertain themselves by forcing grotesquely mismatched old and sick couples to dance to a Jewish street band by the ghetto gate...
Horror: When condemned Jewish workers lie face-down in the street, while one SS guard walks down the line, shooting without remorse each one in the back of the head...
Isolation: When a fugitive emerges from his harrowing hiding place and walks through a field of deserted ruins exactly like the last man alive on Polish soil..
Adrien Brody gives an absolutely moving performance (based on descriptive facial expressions) as the Polish composer and pianist who stays alive as a Jew, and remains true to his ideals... Brody captures the character's desperation, his anger and grief, his willpower and perseverance, his passion and love of music... Polanski gives us the chance to better know his shock and disbelief, his ordeal and tragedy, his hope for fairness and humanity...
Nominated for seven Academy Awards, this captivating drama went on to win three Oscars, including Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay... Once Brody took the stage to accept his Oscar, he was so overwhelmed with happiness, that he swept the gorgeous Academy Award-winning Halle Berry off her feet with a long, steamy kiss...
Movie Review: Spectacular in its innocence
Summary: 5 Stars
After it was garlanded with awards and so much critical acclaim I decided I had to watch The Pianist, even though with war movies you never know whether you'll get something honest and affecting or trite and clichéd. Polanski's movie definitely belongs to the former. Charting the life of the Jewish pianist Szpilman (Brody) against the backdrop of war in Poland it's a powerfully emotional piece that, once you've seen the end especially, makes it well worth sitting down for two and a half hours to watch. Interestingly, rather than show us a view of the Polish resistance or an inside view of the harrowing concentration camps, this is all about one man, and all the better for it. The Pianist achieves a kind of intimacy with its subject that other similar films cannot boast.Beginning with the bombing of the radio station where Szpilman plays to Polish listeners, his family are rapidly dispatched to the Jewish ghetto. I've heard a few reviews stating that the parts of the movie involving Szpilman's family life are clichéd. In a way this is easy to see, with stereotypes being made of various figures such as the brother who refuses to be put down, the valiant sister and the elderly father being used for the sympathy vote. However, the movie is told in such a brilliant manner that you forget all of these clichés (especially since it's based on a true story). There are some scenes that are very difficult to watch - people being shot point blank or tossed from windows - but it's this kind of emotional intensity that make it all the more worthwhile. It was certainly a wise choice to stay out of the concentration camps, in part because the looks on the faces of the Jews being herded into cattle trucks to be sent to their deaths is enough to affect any viewer, and also because it might have been too harrowing for the viewers. Significantly, it is when Szpilman is alone in the bombed down city streets of Warsaw that the movie really scales down to the intimate and where Brody's performance stands alone as one of true excellence. Admitedly these parts can get a little slow, but they're worthwhile for the conclusion, which couldn't have come about without these parts and it's certainly brave of Polanski (and typical) for him not to flinch at any part of Szpilman's memoirs.
The final moments though, are just sublime. Starving in an abandoned house Szpilman is finally discovered by a sympathetic German officer, and these scenes really burn a deep impression into your memory. Acted with humiliation and sense of what's lost, culminating (inevitably) in Szpilman's uplifting/depressing performance of Chopin, it's the emotional core of the movie. Put simpy, this deserved every award it won, and then some.
Movie Review: History is always the victory of a little bit of humanity
Summary: 5 Stars
Polanski had to make a film about the tragic past of the country whose name he carries. He had to concentrate on the primal historical "crime" committed by cosmic time and the war in 1939-1945, the extermination of the Jews by the Germans with the vast complicity of the Poles. The film is brilliant in its dense darkness because Polanski does not concentrate his tale so much on the community but on one particular Jew and his family he will be the only survivor of (it is a true story). He does not choose a Jew that would represent money or work, but a pianist, an artist representing cultural, universal and human talent that has no ethnic color whatsoever. And yet he moves further. After showing the ghettoization of the Jews in Warsaw, then their enslavement and extermination, then the escape of this pianist and his clandestine survival in the hands of non-Jews, some honest resistant fighters who put themselves in danger because of their political action, some (at least one) making a personal profit out of their help, the pianist also sees the meaningful and significant upheaval of the Jews when the ghetto is nearly empty. Pathetic but too late. He sees the doomed upheaval of the liberal resistant fighters and this time too early so that the Germans can exterminate them. Note here the film never really concentrate on the SS as the evil doers and the others as submissive followers. All Germans are concerned. The sacrifice of these resistant fighters leads to nothing since it clears the way for the communists to be the only ones to profit from the arrival of the Russians. Polanski even pushes one step further and there the film becomes a gospel about the shiny side of humanity. That pianist will survive the last few weeks thanks to a Wehrmacht officer who will accept to hide his presence and to feed him through to the end , and even give him a coat - that could have been tragic when the Russians arrived - before leaving. The officer had been convinced to provide this help by some music played on a piano by the Jew in the middle of ruins and on the eve to the final defeat. Music as the universal humanistic language beyond barbarity. Beautiful. Inspiring. A real salvation and epiphany for us all. That is exactly where pathos is discarded and love comes into the picture. A love that can transcend hatred and reach cosmic time in the smallness of human historical if not purely existential time. And If the pianist survive up to 2000, the German officer died in captivity in the USSR in 1952. Irony of irony, it is nothing but irony.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: Heart-felt and powerful
Summary: 5 Stars
Far too many films use war(s) to make their points. For Speilberg, it's a venue for manipulation (Schindler's List being a prime example of bendinghistory to accommodate the director's message); for Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket) it was an opportunity to illustrate the eternal madness of
sending children to war (Viet Nam) and the irreparable damage caused by the experience. For Polanski, it is a solemn ode to the whims of fate and the
power of one man's life force.
The Pianist is, in all ways, an understated film. Polanski makes the sensational matter-of-fact. The bodies of dead Jews in the streets is so horrific to the
occupants of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto that they simply cease seeing them. We the audience see them and are lifted into the mindset of the nearly
half-million people who were bricked into that small area where constant acts of casual madness (people selected at random to take one step forward
and then get shot down, while those not chosen contain their reactions and look away) are routine. Polanski's view is unsentimental, clear-eyed and
imbued with the knowledge of someone who survived the horrors and lived to tell about it.
Brody as pianist Szpilman gives a wonderfully understated performance, his dark soulful eyes haunted; his body is curved inward from perpetual fear
and hunger. And yet, in what has to be one of the most powerful scenes in the film, when a young German officer encounters Brody/Szpilman in an
empty house and asks who he is, what he does, why he's hiding, and Szpilman admits, "I used to be a pianist," and then, at the officer's invitation, sits
down to play--what the music achieves is everything the film needs to say. It's one of the most wrenching scenes ever filmed, profoundly moving and
evocative of both the interior life of the artist, the timelessness of music and, finally, the truth that music is, indeed, the universal language.
The only jarring moment (my daughter and I had a dispute over this scene) was Brody's emerging from hiding in the German officer's greatcoat and
being shocked and surprised at being denounced as a German. My daughter thought it didn't ring true, that someone who'd so scrupulously kept
himself safe and hidden would do something so stupid. My take was that in his leap of joy at realizing freedom was before him, Szpilman simply
forgot about the coat. I'll have to read the book to find out if this is described in more detail.
This is not your feel-good, Hollywood war movie but something rooted firmly in historical reality. But it is important viewing.
My highest recommendation.
Movie Review: Polanski and Brody Bring Szpilman's Story To Life-Brilliant!
Summary: 5 Stars
Director Roman Polanski had much personal history to draw on, when he directed "The Pianist." He spent his own childhood in Poland, and escaped from the Krakow Ghetto, although his mother, and other family members, perished in the Holocaust. Polanski makes this his most personal and powerful film to date, and deservingly won the Academy Award Oscar for Best Director."The Pianist" is the agonizing story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival of the Nazi's destruction of Polish Jewry. The film begins in 1939, with Szpilman playing Chopin on the piano for Radio Warsaw, as the Germans bomb the city, and finally force him to stop playing. History has documented well what happened in Warsaw over the following two years - the Jewish ghetto was constructed and settled, racial laws were written and enforced, people died of starvation, illness, or Nazi murder. Then the "resettlement" roundups began. Szpilman was waiting at the Umshagplatz to be deported to Treblinka, with his family, when fate seemingly intervened, and he was spared. His survival story is a different kind of hell than others that I have seen or read about. Szpilman watches the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and subsequent destruction, from the outside, looking in. Usually, accounts of the Jewish uprising are from former fighters, or survivors, who were inside the ghetto at the time. I can only wonder if Szpilman longed to join his fellow Jews and fight the Nazis, rather than remain in his solitary apartment overlooking the ghetto, with his own end unknown.
The story is told from a uniquely unsentimental point of view. I felt at times that Szpilman, brilliantly portrayed by Adrien Brody, had distanced himself from all emotion, except for the periods when he played the piano in his imagination, and listened to music in his head. Perhaps this detachment was the mechanism that allowed him to survive emotionally.
The well-written screenplay, by Ronald Harwood, was adapted from Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoirs published in 1946. During some of the movie's most emotional parts, there are amazing camera shots of snow falling, or leaves blowing across an empty street, or the snow covered ghetto ruins that look like the end of the world, with the only sound - Chopin's piano music. These film takes add emotion to the film, compensate for, and contrast well with Szpilman's emotional isolation.
There is a haunting scene, near the film's end, with Szpilman and a German officer, that still moves me to tears when I think about it.
The film is a remarkable in its sensitivity, and portrayal of one man's struggle to survive. I highly recommend it.