"The Pianist"

Polanski is also robbing those of us watching the film of our notion of a safe haven. As he did in 1995's "Death and the Maiden," his best film previous to "The Pianist," Polanski is addressing the inadequacy of culture in the face of the unthinkable. That film, with its Latin American doctor turned rapist and torturer, a man who liked to listen to Schubert while he worked, was an attempt to get at how, while pretending to deal with the most horrible events of recent history, culture can actually smooth them over, make them seem safe, contain them and reduce them within the confines of "art." Polanski knows that no book or painting or movie can make mass murder explicable. The passionate messiness and rage of "Death and the Maiden" was a way of saying that art can never be equal to the kind of experience the tortured heroine underwent or, by extension, the experience Polanski suffered as a child or that young Wladyslaw Szpilman suffered in the Warsaw ghetto.

You sense that theme being picked up in the rawness that marks the first half of "The Pianist," in Polanski's refusal to deflect the impact of the senseless shootings and beatings by aestheticizing them. And yet, because he is an artist, Polanski can't help making art of Szpilman's experience, can't help trying to be true to both his own artistry and his experience -- though it's not the kind of art any of us might have expected in a film about the Holocaust.

Nothing in the first half of "The Pianist" prepares you for the audacity of what comes after Wladyslaw, having been spared the death camps, lives as a worker in the ghetto before escaping and, with the help of various members of the underground resistance, hiding in a series of unoccupied apartments. Until this time, Wladyslaw has seemed an almost remote character, really only alive when he's behind the keyboard. There's a heartbreaking moment when Wladyslaw, in one of his hideouts, holds his hands inches above a keyboard and goes through the motions of playing. Striking the keys themselves would be to risk discovery. Stripped of the possibility of playing, Wladyslaw is, in a sense, stripped of his identity. Brody's performance is astonishing in the way it actually keeps us distanced from Wladyslaw when he is most secure, most "whole" -- we come to feel closest to him when he's reduced to the impulse to survive.

I can't imagine what Brody put himself through physically for this film. His hair and beard give him the look of a derelict, and his weight loss makes him seem one of the walking corpses of that time. It's a largely wordless, almost completely interior performance, a compendium of eloquent silences and a bottomless humanity. We watch Brody as Wladyslaw scrounges crumbs and shelter, as he carries around a can of pickles in hopes of finding a can opener, as all concept of time vanishes except the few minutes to come.

In the last hour of the film, Polanski and Brody come close to making a great silent comedy about the Holocaust. That's not to say that what we see is funny, but Brody's huge, somber eyes and rail-thin frame call to mind Buster Keaton making his way stoically through one disaster after another. Polanski seems to be channeling the sadness at the heart of film comedy, especially Keaton's films. When Wladyslaw vaults a wall to escape some German soldiers and begins running away, the camera pulls up to take in the vast, overpowering landscape of the destroyed Warsaw.

After a few breathless strides, Wladyslaw stops dead in his tracks, stunned into stillness by what he sees, stung by the black joke of their being nowhere to escape to, of what survival means when it looks as if there is no life anywhere. In that moment, he's a bit like Keaton wandering through a hurricane in "Steamboat Bill, Jr.," alone in the universe, just skirting calamity by luck or invention. When a German officer comes upon Wladyslaw in hiding and asks him what he is doing, and Wladyslaw, proffering his precious pickles, answers, "I was just trying to open this can," we seem to have traveled from Keaton to Samuel Beckett. It's the summation of the black humor that runs through the film, a definition of a sorrowful, existential state that can conceive of no future beyond the next task. Brody's reading of that line can make you laugh as tears are running down your face. (In moments like this, Polanski's film can be seen as a rebuke to the cretinous sentimentality of Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful.")

Until Thomas Kretschmann enters the film as that officer (his part is small, but his performance is vivid and crucial to the movie), every actor who plays a Nazi is atrocious. They seem to be digging into the worst clichés of Nazis as leering, piggy sadists. I think the badness, the clichéd portrayal of evil, is intentional on Polanski's part. It sets us up for the curve that Kretschmann's appearance throws us and, after the rage that has built in us as we have watched the Nazi brutalization of the Jews, prevents us from going home with our hatred. What Polanski is doing here could, in lesser hands, have easily turned the film into a soggy brotherhood speech. For Polanski, it is simply an acknowledgment of the moral complications of wartime.

If anyone has the authority to speak about the scars that violence can leave on life, it's Roman Polanski. Maybe his desire here to get something of his own experience down on film has made him ask what is really important to him. He seems to have concluded that survival must have a meaning beyond hatred and nihilism and hopelessness. And in the closing scene of Wladyslaw playing with an orchestra after the war (the piece he performs is Chopin's Grand Polonaise for piano and orchestra, the same piece we see him silently practicing while in hiding), Polanski reverses the end of "Death and the Maiden," with its insistence that the niceties of culture are irrelevant in the face of the unthinkable.

Instead, the director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves, the selves that have no place when life is reduced to the imperative to survive. In the liner notes to the CD of his Carnegie Hall debut, the Russian pianist Mikhail Pletnev writes, "I want to make music sound so strong, make it visibly significant and appealing to the most essential basic feelings of every human individual." In "The Pianist," that's what Roman Polanski has done.

• View blog reactions