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The Pianist—Not Just "Another Holocaust Movie"
There is a moment in The Pianist, the new film from Roman Polanski (Chinatown), that bears the mark of the great director's dark sense of humor. A Jew on the run from the Nazis sees an opportunity to find refuge and safety, and he runs toward it. But at the very moment when there is no more reason for him to be in danger, a sickening twist of circumstance intervenes—almost a silly thing if it were not so deadly serious. The entire audience is drawn to the edges of their seats, and because it is Polanski steering the film, it's impossible to know whether this grueling survival story will take a tragic turn due to a mere misunderstanding.

This paralyzing, intense sequence is just one of many sobering scares in this awe-inspiring and exhausting motion picture, which won the coveted Palm D'Or Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This week it continues to gain rave reviews from critics as it begins its U.S. run. Some are predicting Oscar nominations for best picture, best director, and best actor. Adrien Brody deserves high honors for his work portraying Wladyslaw Szpilman, a concert pianist whose career, family, and community are trampled underfoot as the Nazis crush his Warsaw home.

As I wrote last week, The Pianist is the most riveting film I saw in 2002. (My full review is at Looking Closer.) This week, other religious press critics are offering similar praise.

Steven D. Greydanus (Decent Films) praises it as a "masterful film, one that resolutely avoids melodrama, polemicism, heroics, or sentimentality. The Nazis commit ghastly atrocities, but aren't demonized; the protagonist … isn't celebrated. The result is a powerful film that is not about good and evil or cowardice and courage, but simply, starkly, life and death, civilization and chaos."

Doug Cummings (Chiaroscuro) says Polanski's Holocaust film "is a surprisingly hopeful one. This film … benefits in the sort of tossoff detail only a survivor could know. The movie differs from Schindler's List in at least two ways: it circumvents the extermination camps by focusing on the slow roasting of Warsaw and its people by slight degrees, and its protagonist isn't a savior looking in, but a victim reaching out. And Szpilman and Polanski (artist-survivors, both) offset the terrors by a love for music, a source of unquenchable beauty that touches all those with ears to hear and miraculously provides a way to endure."

Ted Baehr (Movieguide) addresses what may be a common misconception: "Going into the film, there is a tendency to say, 'Not one more Holocaust movie.' But this is not just another Holocaust movie. It is a history, which has been brought to life by a brilliant mind and will speak to everyone with its good sense, to all who seek to understand the past." Regarding Polanski, he writes, "The Pianist is arguably his best movie to date. [The film] builds to an incredible intensity. Every scene is thought out carefully. [Brody's] acting is superb. The sets also are incredible. Polanski takes viewers from the beauty of pre-war Warsaw to a devastation that is hard to imagine. As it is, the movie is almost a documentary with the power of drama. The Pianist deserved the Cannes Film Festival Palm d'Or."

But some disagree. Gerri Pare (Catholic News Service) calls it "a very personal work for the filmmaker who himself escaped the Krakow ghetto when he was only 7," but argues that it "fails to have the expected emotional impact."

Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) also notices a tone of "detachment," but considers that a strength. "There have been some critical complaints that the film is too emotionally detached; that we don't have a visceral connection with the characters or understand how they are emotionally responding to the events around them. I believe this, in itself, is a tremendous statement that Polanski is making. The enormity of the events; the unexplainable hatred and evil that showed its face; the amount of loss and grief mixed with the guilt of surviving. … It is all too much for human comprehension. We record, as does Szpilman, what is happening with a sense of disbelief. That disbelief later must grow to a kind of detached awareness because to emotionally connect with the sights, sounds, and smells of the horror would be too much for us to bear.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47