a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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It may be useful, in considering Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist, to consider how different it is from a far more famous and celebrated film about the Holocaust.
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List endures as a historical overview of Hitler’s crimes against humanity. It shows us the tragedy and horror from all angles, like a collection of photographs and brief testimonies. Spielberg uses every trick in the book, artful and artificial, to make us feel the pain of those who suffered. For most of the film, he tries clinical re-creations; by the end he has given in to his trademark sentimentality, offering emotional breakdowns and simple platitudes. As if realizing he has lost his grip on reality, he thrusts real-live survivors in our face, to make sure we understand that this really happened. It’s an effective and at times profound work, but its flaws show more and more with age.
By comparison, The Pianist, based on Ronald Harwood screenplay of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s journals, is focused, absolutely devoid of sentimentality, and honest. Instead of trying to shove the whole abhorrent affair down our throats, Polanski grounds his story in the experience of one man, and lets us experience the Holocaust as people really did — in a state of semi-denial until the only way to survive was grovel, scrounge, rebel, or run. This film, the most moving and powerfully crafted film I’ve seen all year, will offer you a shocking portrayal of how the Jews in Warsaw found themselves trapped in an irrational and unstoppable death machine. It will also cause you to stop and think about the riches we take for granted: family, food, music, freedom.
At first, it feels more like a bad dream than reality. Rumors. Radio news reports. Scowls. Then the madness actually invades your privacy, your peace of mind, your neighborhood. You have to wear an armband proclaiming that you are a Jew. You are turned away at the door of establishments you once enjoyed. People whisper behind your back and start looking at you as though you’re some species of dangerous and repulsive dog. The soldiers who hate you gain confidence. They take pleasure in taunting you and your friends. You watch the old folks in your neighborhood being abused because they can’t respond to ridiculous and abusive commands fast enough – like the man in the wheelchair told to stand up.
Then you, your family, and your friends – those that are Jewish – are driven like cattle into overcrowded streets, and you watch brick walls go up, confining you to a chaotic ghetto. Food starts to run out. You are forced to live on potatoes. Rumors fester, and then the worst of them prove true. Members of your family start disappearing mysteriously or growing sick with no help for it. Then you are told to get on a mysterious train. You run. You hide. You wonder about the fate of your family. You find those who will hide you in a closet or a hole. You grow sick from malnourishment. And now the worst part of it is the unknown, silences, footsteps in the corridor, unanswered questions. You wonder if anybody out there is going to try to help.
It is not a story of heroics. Szpilman, who made his living as an acclaimed pianist, only had enough resources and spirit to manage survival. Opportunities rise for striking back alongside conspiratorial rebels, but Szpilman is an awkward and introspective man. He’s not made for violent uprisings. His heart is full of music, and his fingers know only the keys of a piano. He’s not fit for the manual labor of bricklaying, which the Germans force him to do, nor is he the kind of man who can smuggle guns or set up ambushes.
Szpilman is played with utterly convincing grief and desperation by Adrien Brody in the year’s most significant performance. Brody’s physical transformation over the course of the film is as affecting as Tom Hanks’ in Cast Away, but it’s a humbler piece of work. The camera does not try to dazzle you with his slow deterioration. It is not a stunt. Brody generously keeps our focus on the story, not himself.
But the story is so consistently portrayed through Szpilman’s senses that we have a much clearer idea of the sights, sounds, and physical blows suffered in these events. When Szpilman is trapped in a room, we are left to wonder were the ominous sounds outside the door are coming from. When a bomb goes off in the apartment next door, the sound of the ensuing chaos is muffled by the ringing in our ears. I haven’t felt a character’s fears, emotional truamas, physical needs, and feeble hope this tangibly since young Jamie rummaged through the abandoned houses of the wealthy in Empire of the Sun.
It feels like the most honest film about the Holocaust yet offered, specifically because the horrors are glimpsed, but not lingered over. If we were experiencing these things, we would not stop and watch the atrocities in slow motion while music soared to tell us how to feel about it. We would not stand and watch tears pouring down faces in close-up. We would catch a glimpse of unimaginable violence, and we would run or turn away. The methodical nature of the violence, and the way that abusive or violent exchanges became as common on the street as a handshake, is what makes this horror so much more believable and affecting. We notice the horror, giving it the impact of a discovery, rather than having it shoved in our faces.
Polanski won the Palme d’Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival for this intimate account of a frightened survivor. He deserved it. This is very likely the most personal film about the Holocaust ever made. Polanksi may be telling someone else’s story, but he survived it as well. He paints these pictures with the passion of someone who has stared the monster in the face. His mother died at Auschwitz, his father suffered in a concentration camp. He himself escaped the ghetto by crawling through a hole in a barbed-wire fence. He was seven years old. The feelings of helplessness and desperation he orchestrates in the audience are thus not the work of a trickster, but of a master communicator. Thus, this addition to the long list of Holocaust films give us the most palpable sense of what it was to face these horrors and struggle for hope and sustenance.
In a way, this is what Polanski has been doing with his whole career — using art to try and release the nightmare he has lived with for so long. Sometimes, his expressions are burdensome and chaotic. The subjects have changed, but Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and even lesser works like Frantic have portrayed the world as fraught with immeasurable evil that corrupts well-intentioned men. Storytellers who did not live it can tell the stories of inspiring joy and victory; those who were actually there are still wrestling with the horrors, re-living the loss. Polanksi is anything but a messenger of hope, and it would be presumptuous of us to expect him to provide false rays of sunlight. What can we expect of a man who watched his own neighbors agree to help the Germans, betraying their friends and families out of cowardice?
The biggest surprise of the film is that, even after showing us such a parade of horrors carried out by the Germans, Polanski insists on avoiding an “us/them” dynamic. We can see the sparks of hatred, prejudice, and violence in the hearts of his own community too.
Polanski is clearly at the top of his game here, portraying evil as one who has been there. But I sense something else here that sets The Pianist apart from his other films. Szpilman survives by dreaming of music, playing invisible pianos, clinging to his dreams at the edge of despair. This keeps him going. But, whether Polanski sees it or not, Szpilman is also preserved by grace. A few people find it in their hearts to hide poor begging Szpilman. Even a German has a bewildering moment of compassion. Tiny rays of light break through the darkness, guiding this suffering soul to redemption. I can only interpret this as God, giving us evidence of his spirit, using human beings who, left to themselves, would only seek their own survival. Sometimes music itself reaches him from a faraway piano or a radio, like God whispering to him… “Just a little farther. Just a little more.”
And on the other side of the shadow, Szpilman’s life becomes one of communicating visions of beauty and sadness to the world. He has not been a hero. In fact, in the early chapters he is rather self-absorbed and cowardly. But granted a second chance, his art becomes a way of communicating the persistence of beauty even in the valley of the shadow of death. He has walked through the darkness, led by rumors of glory, and he can encourage us and help us mourn.
Today, we have hardly put the Holocaust behind us. Movies that tell us the war is won are uninformed. The world still teeters on the edge of war and chaos. Genocide still happens. Arrogant governments shove whole nations around and stereotype their peoples as lesser beings. We do not need movies to tell us how to end the madness, because evil is here to stay and on earth the madness will never end. What we need is art that shows how beauty and sustaining grace are provided in the midst of the madness.
I get the feeling that Polanski is expressing through this movie how he deals with such painful scars, haunting memories, and lasting grief. Through the gift of art, he wrestles with his questions, because there he can catch glimmers of order, echoes of music, evidence of a beauty and a meaning that endures.
Szpilman is a survivor, but he is much more than that. He is the enemy’s defeat. His story is a testimony to beauty’s triumph over art. The joy that beauty inspires is the revelation that the victory has already been won, even before the enemy is finished waging the war. A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.
August 11th, 2010 at 9:38 am
[...] an excellent review of this film you might like to look at the Looking Closer by Jeffrey Overstreet which I have just discovered. Plenty of movies reviewed there. On the [...]