Review

Review Date: 5-January-03
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

The Pianist (2002)

It's both good and bad that the body of cinematic work concerning the Holocaust keeps growing: good, because there are still some alarmingly delusional freaks out there who insist it never happened, and bad, because the more we see of it, the more we become desensitized to it. It's shocking to accept that, within my parents' lifetime, it was commonplace in cities across Europe to find men shooting other men point blank in the middle of the street with impunity, and I find it extremely disturbing that when I see dramatizations of such things I tend to think, "Right, right, I have processed this already." For these reasons, I am almost grateful to Roman Polanski's impressive new movie "The Pianist," which illustrates the atrocities committed by the Nazis using a real-life story, as most Holocaust movies do, but manages to add a new shade to my picture of the matter: the stark, simple, narrow reality of a human being just trying to stay alive amid unimaginable chaos.

Adrien Brody gives a marvelous performance as Wladyslaw Szpilman, a noted Polish pianist who lived with his family in Warsaw when the Nazis arrived in 1939. The script offers just the right note of introduction to the Szpilman family --- handsome father, fond mother, two fine daughters, one strapping, rebellious son, and the quieter, more artistic Wladyslaw --- which helps the viewer both to feel what is at stake and to understand the nature of the protagonist. This understanding is important, for Szpilman's tale is not about dynamic heroism, remarkable ingenuity, or unshakable courage, but rather the will to survive that emerges in a terrified, dirty, sick, lonely wreck of a man whose talent and character were designed for art and beauty instead of defiance and warfare. When his family is forced out of the ghetto and herded to the train station for what must have been its last trip, Wladyslaw is separated from them by the merciful hand of an acquaintance on the Jewish police force under the Germans. For years afterward, he manages to stay alive and relatively unharmed, relying entirely on the kindness of strangers and his own impulse to keep going, eat when and what he can, and simply not die.

"The Pianist," therefore, is a Holocaust movie that isn't really about the Nazis or the Jews or WWII. While the film does include instances of brutality and courage (you cannot help but admire the people who risked their own necks to help Szpilman), the heart of the matter is Brody's portrayal of a gentle soul trying to exist in a world turned upside down. The movie's surprising and emotional central scene brings this point home: in times of utter turmoil and societal disintegration, life is driven by primal impulses such as hatred, hunger, compassion, even the love of beauty, and you never know what you are going to find. The armageddon and its aftermath so often used in sci-fi films to speculate on human nature really happened in Poland (and elsewhere) in the early 1940s, and we don't need to fantasize about how one quiet man, at least, would handle himself in such a situation. His memorable tale reveals that what is true in art is sometimes true in life: despite all setbacks and in accordance with our most basic instincts, the show must go on.

Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.