The Pianist (2002) Review

Wladyslaw Szpilman is playing Chopin live on Polish radio in September 1939 when a shell hits the building. He keeps playing until the studio comes apart around him, and then he goes home.

The 10 is for a film that removes every consolation the genre normally supplies. Szpilman does not resist, does not organize, does not save anybody and is not saved by his own virtue. He survives because of luck, other people’s decisions, and an ability to stay very still for a long time.

There is nothing to withhold a point for. It is the most disciplined film made about the subject and Polanski’s refusal to dramatize his own experience directly is a large part of why.

Survival Without Meaning

Almost every Holocaust film supplies a reason for the survivor’s survival. Courage, cleverness, a special usefulness, an act of witness. This one refuses all of it.

Szpilman is pulled out of a deportation line by a policeman who happens to know him, and he does not choose it or earn it. His family goes on to the train. The film shows him being pushed away and then shows the train leaving, and no music tells you how to feel about the difference.

After that he is passed between people who hide him for a range of reasons, some brave, some transactional, some accidental. He contributes almost nothing. He waits in rooms, moves when told, and grows thinner.

The refusal to make him heroic is the film’s moral position. Making survival a reward for virtue implies that the dead lacked it, and Polanski, whose mother died at Auschwitz, declines the implication completely.

His brother Henryk is the counterweight and the film is quiet about it. Henryk argues, refuses to wear the armband, will not take the safe job, and is exactly the person an audience wants a Holocaust protagonist to be. He dies with the rest of the family, and the film draws no conclusion from the difference between the brothers at all.

The Camera Stays Where It Is

Pawel Edelman’s photography is the other half of the discipline. The camera does not move toward violence. It stands where a person would be standing and lets things happen at a distance.

The wheelchair sequence is the clearest example. A family is raided across the street, and a man who cannot stand is thrown from a balcony. The film watches from the Szpilmans’ window, from too far away, without cutting in, and the distance is what makes it unbearable.

That framing recurs throughout. Beatings happen at the edge of shots. A woman asks a question and is shot mid-sentence and the camera does not follow her down. Polanski has said he wanted the audience positioned as a witness instead of a participant.

The second half is nearly wordless. Szpilman moves through a Warsaw that has been reduced to rubble, and Polanski shoots the ruins in long static compositions that turn a city into a landscape. Studio Babelsberg built a great deal of it, and none of it looks built.

Wojciech Kilar’s score is used sparingly enough to notice its absence. Long stretches carry no music at all, so the film runs on footsteps, distant gunfire and the sound of a man trying not to be heard, and when Chopin finally returns it lands as an event instead of as underscoring.

Brody Lost the Weight and the Rest

Adrien Brody was twenty-nine and largely unknown. He lost around thirty pounds, gave up his apartment and his car, and arrived in Europe with almost nothing, which sounds like a stunt and produced the correct result.

The performance changes shape twice. In the first hour he is a well-dressed professional with a family and a career, faintly vain, taking a great deal for granted. By the last hour he is an animal in an attic who has forgotten how to speak.

He also learned enough piano to be filmed convincingly at the keyboard, and the final performance for Hosenfeld is played with hands that have not touched an instrument in years, which Brody renders as physical difficulty instead of transcendence.

There is an earlier scene that pays that one off. Hiding in an apartment with a piano he is forbidden to touch, Szpilman sits at the keyboard and plays with his hands a few inches above the keys, hearing it and making no sound. It is the best image in the film and it says everything about what has been taken from him.

He won Best Actor at twenty-nine, the youngest man to take it, from a field that included far more famous names. Polanski took Best Director and Ronald Harwood the adapted screenplay, from seven nominations.

Hosenfeld Is Left Unexplained

A German officer finds Szpilman hiding in a ruined house, asks him to play, listens, and then keeps him alive with food and a coat.

The film gives no reason. Wilm Hosenfeld was a real officer who saved several people, and there is a documented record of his views, and Polanski declines to use any of it. Thomas Kretschmann plays the scene with a stillness that could be pity, calculation or exhaustion.

That refusal is the second great decision in the film. An explanation would convert Hosenfeld into a redemption, and a redemption would make the audience feel better about a uniform that killed most of the people in the story.

The postscript is where the film puts the weight. Hosenfeld died in Soviet custody. Szpilman tried to find him and was too late. Nothing about the encounter resolves, which is the shape history usually has.

The coat is the detail that stays with me. Hosenfeld gives Szpilman a German officer’s coat against the cold, and it nearly gets him shot by the liberating Polish forces at the end. The single act of kindness in the film is also the thing that almost kills him, and nobody remarks on the irony.

The Argument About Polanski

Any discussion of this film now runs into its director, and the honest position is that the two questions are separate and both are real.

The film exists because of his history. Polanski was six when the Germans entered Poland, escaped the Krakow Ghetto, watched his father taken away and lost his mother at Auschwitz. He turned down Schindler’s List because it was too close, and made this instead, from somebody else’s memoir, which put a layer between him and the material.

That distance is visible in the work and is the reason it succeeds. A direct autobiography would have carried more feeling and less precision. Szpilman’s account gave him a structure that was not his own to be exact about.

Whether the achievement is separable from the man is a question people answer differently and I will not pretend it has a settled answer. What I can say is that the film’s discipline is its own, and it is the most rigorous treatment of the subject anybody has managed.

Should you watch The Pianist?

Yes, and prepare for it. This is a film that declines to make survival meaningful, declines to explain the one act of mercy in it, and declines to move the camera closer to anything, and every one of those refusals is why it works where more emotional films about the same subject do not.

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