Who is The Pianist?

Roman Polanski's new movie may be the greatest historical film centered on an enigmatic character since Lawrence of Arabia - and Polanski's protagonist, Wladyslaw Szpilman (played by Adrien Brody), is no epic champion of an underdog people but rather, just barely, a survivor of the Holocaust.

He's part of a close, healthily combative Warsaw Jewish family with a brother and two sisters and a father who plays the violin. But he's also set apart from them, perhaps by artistic temperament. In one of many heart-piercing yet unsentimental moments, as they walk to the cattle cars, he tells his younger sister that he's sorry he never knew her better - and she thanks him. Then one of the Germans' loathsome hired Jewish cops pulls Szpilman out of the mob and saves him from the camps. He never sees his family again. And he owes his life to a thug.

The screen appears to be set for a tale of grace under pressure at the beginning, when the elegant musical star of Polish radio, with the Gershwinesque profile and the dreamy gaze, plays Chopin and refuses to stop until German shells crash through his studio. But The Pianist, based on Szpilman's astoundingly cogent memoir of the same name, compels the viewer to transcend any yearning for comforting heroic concepts.

Polanski's film is both harrowingly specific about the destruction of Warsaw's Jewry and cuttingly universal about the jolting compromises of life during wartime. What is courage and what is foolishness under Nazi guns? The father (Frank Finlay) says he'll never wear the Star of David on his sleeve; soon he's walking with it on his overcoat. He tries to remain upbeat: When the Germans relocate all Jews to a two-part ghetto (later it becomes one), he looks at the close quarters and declares them better than he expected. But neither the personal optimism of Szpilman's father nor the historical optimism of a political friend can see them through catastrophe.

The effects of war

The Pianist tests an audience's movie-bred expectations, then, stirringly, confounds them. Will Szpilman have a fling with that pretty blond Gentile who threw herself at him while the bombs fell? Will he pick up a gun after he and his family watch the brutal execution of another family's men from a house across the street? Common notions of humanity as well as a desire for excitement may make a viewer root for Szpilman to become a resistance ringleader, or at least for Polanski to open up the picture to salute the fallen fighters. But the brilliance of The Pianist lies in its depiction of cataclysmic events through the eyes of a single sensitive individual. Before long, you fall under a dark hypnotic spell that doesn't break until Szpilman's image fades from the screen. At Cannes, where the movie won the Golden Palm, it received a 20-minute ovation. When I saw it with a heterogeneous, paying audience, no one left until the final credit had rolled and the last piece of music had ended.

Szpilman's combination of mental toughness and vulnerability makes it possible for Polanski to achieve a revealing, emotionally leveling intimacy. Szpilman is magnetic, because no matter how hard it is for anyone to know him, he appears to know himself.

As part of the dwindling Jewish workforce in the Warsaw Ghetto, he helps smuggle guns while realizing he can't hold out for the uprising. With the help of a friend, a rebellion leader, Szpilman escapes - only to become a sort of urban castaway, isolated in one "safe" apartment after another, dependent on not-always-reliable members of the Polish underground, and finally left utterly alone in a ruined city.

What Polanski shows you, with the intensifying force of an escalating genocide, is just what total war can do: deflate every natural expectation of respect, trust and rationality; rupture any human bonds; and remove any hope of sustaining life. Through much of the final 40 minutes, one of the most haunting passages in the history of the cinema, Szpilman is the sole ghost slinking through a ghost town. And yet this gaunt, bearded specter, scouring bare cupboards for handfuls of grain and scooping dirty buckets for water, has kept some spirit alive. He sits in the middle of an abandoned hospital fingering an invisible keyboard according to the repertoire in his brain.

Szpilman is an Everyman clinging to existence with gifts that every man doesn't have: a radical devotion to music and a huge talent for playing it. His purity beautifully offsets the movie's pageant of persecution and corruption, whether he's sanctioning, with a conductor-like gesture, the sale of his piano so his family can eat, or performing for the rich habitues of a ghetto cafe while the poor starve in the street. (In one shriveling moment, he must pause in his playing so two of the customers can test the clink of some coins.)

And it's Szpilman's genius that makes the film uplifting. When he finally plays after a seeming eternity of silence, it's for the most unlikely audience - a German officer. The movie audience applauds: for the glory of the music and its performance and for the survival of music itself, the tenacity of human creativity.

Greatest triumph

Polanski presents this story with a steely intelligence that is both ravaging and emboldening. He resists the twin temptations to aestheticize the material or to enlarge it in epic-movie terms. Despite the Chopin on the soundtrack, the movie's rhythms are those of a keenly observant and deftly inflected prose, not music or poetry. Because Polanski resists any underlining, editorializing or embellishment, and because his timing and staging are so masterfully unobtrusive, you experience the shocks from inside every scene. Szpilman's pinhole view of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt and Polish Home Army uprising intensifies and sets these experiences in your mind like a pinhole camera.

Throughout, Polanski watches as Szpilman does, without drawing moral or behavioral conclusions. One crazy old man makes a game of "shooting" Germans with a cane, and lives. A tough old Jew who speaks of standing up to the Nazis tries to help a pregnant woman and is bludgeoned to death. Some of the Gentile Poles in Szpilman's years on the run endanger him or raise a hue and cry for the Nazis; others risk their safety to preserve him. By the end, all Szpilman can do is hang on to his senses. Calmly and powerfully, the film grows more subjective as it goes on. Polanski's use of sound to journey to the center of Szpilman's brain is so precise that when an explosion momentarily deafens him we fear his loss of hearing almost as much as we would his death.

Brody's performance is prodigious, and so subtle it may click at different times for different people. For me it came together at the moment in the ghetto when he tries to save his brother from immediate execution or deportation. As he raises and focuses his eyes with heartbreaking intensity toward his sibling, you see all the life-or-death passion that usually goes into his music, or his dream of it.

With incredible bravery, Brody stays true to a detached personality; only gradually does he divulge the fellow-feeling deep inside. Brody's greatest triumph is not just his keyboard dexterity, but his eloquence at conveying that Szpilman's art is what completes him. Between them, Polanski and Brody create, in The Pianist, a portrait of the artist as survivor.

The Pianist

Starring Adrien Brody

Directed by Roman Polanski

Rated R

Released by Focus

Time 148 minutes

Sun Score: ****