'The Pianist' Strikes a Personal Chord

Author: Padma Govindan

Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a renowned pianist for Polish radio in the 1930s and a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and occupation, is many things, but sentimental it is not.
In the movie, Szpilman -- singled out for survival by the guilt of a Jewish officer in the Nazi army while the rest of his family is taken to the concentration camps -- is the lone survivor of his family.
He spends the rest of the occupation as an escapee from the ghetto, watching the events of the war unfold outside the window of the secure apartment of his friends who are members of in the underground resistance.
The film charts the events of the war from Szpilman's desperate, claustrophobic perspective. Polanski's penchant for showing the simultaneously weak and admirable side of humanity when faced by tremendous evil (think "Chinatown") is not watered down in this relentlessly objective portrayal of the Holocaust.
Adrien Brody brilliantly brings to life the role of the flawed Szpilman to life as a cocky, supremely talented man who takes for granted the ease and good fortune he is given.
In the first half of the movie, Brody's Szpilman is charming and quick-witted. He plays through a radio broadcast even as the station is being bombed and conspires to seduce a young woman (played by Emilia Fox) who later, in concert with her husband, helps him escape from the ghetto.
Slowly, as the film progresses, Szpilman's arrogant self-assurance is stripped down to an animal-like terror and numbness--an odd combination of courage, passivity and a blind instinct for survival.
More than anything, however, the film shows him as an ordinary man who is no more in control of his fate or others' than a pet animal. He is anyone but Oscar Schindler.
The comparisons to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" are inevitable. Polanski's film, however, carries as its strength both the unrelenting honesty of his portrayal of the Holocaust and also the paradoxically narrow yet universal nature of its focus.
Unlike the admirable but flawed "Schindler's List," "The Pianist" remains focused on the story of one survivor.
By doing so, the film becomes more resonant, less bogged-down by the weight of trying to produce a comprehensive vision of the Holocaust.
Instead of being saved by the deliberate action of one identifiable person (like the Jews are in "Schindler's List"), Szpilman's survival is brought about by the arbitrary nature of survival itself, by some monstrous combination of luck, chance and the kindness of strangers.
In the disease-ridden ghetto and in the lethal environment of occupied Warsaw, Szpilman's survival becomes a sick joke, an example of the purest absurdity.
There is no girl in a red coat to tug at our heartstrings. Instead, Polanski gives us the images of a starving man trying to steal soup from a woman in the ghetto and licking the spills off the sidewalk, the ridiculousness of young ghetto men putting underground resistance newsletters in their pants to post up on bathroom walls, and of a gaunt Szpilman, wandering through bombed-out Warsaw clutching a jar of pickles.
His survival does not occur because of anything rational, but merely because of the chance concurrence of events that saves him and damns the rest. "The Pianist" is resonant, painful and ultimately one of the most rewarding films released this year.