"The Pianist"

Roman Polanski's wrenching World War II magnum opus confronts the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto and the moral complexities of war -- and asserts the power of art, just maybe, to triumph over nihilism.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 27, 2002 | When a well-known filmmaker who is nearly 70, and who possesses a distinctive style and singular sensibility, changes his way of making movies, it's surely a sign of his faith in both the medium itself and his own creative powers, a sign that he possesses the confidence to make a sea change at the age when most directors are winding down their careers. Or, as in the case of Roman Polanski's extraordinary new film "The Pianist," it can herald the artistic essentialism that comes with age.

In "The Pianist," Polanski is saying what he has long wanted to say, confronting the roots of his own preoccupations and obsessions, and he allows nothing to get in the way. It's his most emotionally direct film, at times even a brutally blunt film. "The Pianist," which was adapted by the playwright Ronald Harwood ("The Dresser") from the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish classical pianist who spent World War II on the run in Warsaw, offers a direct parallel to Polanski's own experience as a Jewish boy hiding in the Krakow ghetto and then on the run through the Polish countryside (an experience his friend Jerzy Kosinski drew on in his novel "The Painted Bird").

When we see Nazis ordering Jews to run through the streets as they gun them down, we can't help but think of how laughing German soldiers used the young Polanski for target practice while the terrified boy dodged their bullets. Polanski is going to the source of the themes of victimization and violence that have run through his movies. Only this time, there is none of the sardonic ghoulishness that has characterized his work.

Like the dead-rotting face of Mrs. Bates subliminally imprinted on her son Norman at the end of "Psycho," a death's-head grin seemed to emerge on the very celluloid of pictures like "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown." The black humor of those films (like Faye Dunaway's character in "Chinatown" having a "flaw" in her eye, the same eye later shot out of her head) was without compassion. The grim hopelessness of Polanski's humor was the coping strategy of someone whose life had twice been marked by pure evil. You could understand where it came from and still be repulsed by it.

There is no such distancing in "The Pianist." Here Polanski is almost frighteningly open to the portrayal of inexplicable evil. At times I felt myself pulling away from the screen, as if Polanski were milking my response. When Nazis pick ghetto Jews out of a milling crowd and force them to dance, Polanski shows us a cripple on crutches falling to the ground. Polanski rubs our face in the obviousness of the cruelty, and it's grating; that man seems doubly humiliated. And yet were Polanski to shrink from the worst it would seem inappropriately prim. He might almost be answering here for the grotesqueries his own films have relished.

Experience alone cannot trump art. But it can lend art an unimpeachable authority. And if anyone has a right to depict the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, it's Polanski. "The Pianist" took the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival but almost immediately, the critical word coming out of Cannes was that it was Polanski's most conventional movie, something like an old-fashioned well-made studio film of the '40s. Is it the directness of the film that generated that response? Whatever the reason, classifying "The Pianist" as conventional doesn't take into account how the film proceeds from the unblinking depiction of Nazi atrocities into territory which is artistically very risky, and how Polanski complicates the righteous anger the film stirs up in us. I think Polanski is attempting to put us in the shoes of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) by making the events of the movie so direct and overwhelming that they cannot be easily sorted out. He makes us feel but does not always tell us how or even what to feel.

Early on we see Wladyslaw's father (Frank Finlay) viciously slapped by a Nazi for failing to bow to him on the street, as Warsaw residents pass by the injured old man, paying him no notice. Is it an acceptance of the Nazis' anti-Semitism or simple self-preservation, the Poles' knowledge of what would happen to them if they attempted to intervene? Shortly after that, we see ghetto Jews attempting to carry on their everyday business while the corpses of those who have died of starvation litter the streets. It's impossible to resolve your feelings about those scenes -- are we watching callousness or some sort of subtly heroic defiance, a determination that life, even this stunted life, should continue? Polanski complicates things even further by showing us that determination to survive taken to its most logical and horrible conclusion: the Jewish policemen who, to ensure their own survival, worked for the Nazis keeping order in the ghetto.

On the surface, the first half of "The Pianist" follows a familiar course. Wladyslaw's middle-class family, his parents, two sisters and brother, are moved from their spacious apartment to a cramped one in the newly barricaded Warsaw ghetto, and then to workers' barracks, and then to the trains that will take them to the camps. It's a gripping, assured piece of filmmaking, though perhaps the fact that we have all seen and read stories like this, in films about the Holocaust and in memoirs of the time, keeps us from grasping just how distinctive it is.

The film has the simultaneous feel of being observed as it happens and of springing from a complete vision. We all know about the horrors the European Jews faced. But no movie has ever presented them in quite this way. Again and again in "The Pianist," the Szpilman family glimpses those horrors from a removed vantage point; for example, from their darkened apartment as Nazis raid a Jewish building across the street. And later, Wladyslaw watches the Warsaw ghetto uprising from the high windows of apartments where he is hiding. I think Polanski uses this motif, watching murder and death from a window, to convey the derangement of everyday life under the Nazis. "The Pianist" is very much about how notions like the familiarity and safe haven of home became an alien concept in wartime.

Next Page: As in "Death and the Maiden," an obsession with the inadequacy of art when facing the most profound horrors of our age

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