With “The Pianist,” director Roman Polanski throws his audience into the Warsaw of 1939.
Germany recently has begun its blitzkrieg in Poland, and the film opens with pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) playing for a Warsaw radio station.
Explosions move closer and closer to the radio station; the manager taps on the glass and signals to Szpilman to stop and leave the building. He shakes his head, closes his eyes and, leaning in toward his piano, lightly continues playing.
A bomb falls near the radio station, blowing a hole in the wall. The bewildered Szpilman then stands and quietly leaves for his home through the new exit.
For Szpilman, the spiral downward has begun. In a few months, his country will be under humiliating and harsh military rule. In about one year he, his family, and his neighboring Jews will live under unbearable conditions in the Warsaw ghetto.
In three years, his entire family will be dead, and he will live by himself, a rare and isolated refugee, behind one of his friend’s apartments overlooking the remains of a burned and empty ghetto. He will suffer from jaundice and starvation.
He also will survive the war.
The movie points out, although he will survive, he had little control over his fate. Just before he enters a boxcar on its way to the camps, Szpilman is pulled out of the line by a Jewish police officer who recognizes him at the last moment.
He then lives behind the apartment of a Polish underground member who volunteers to take him. He is instructed to remain as quiet as possible and told his food will be brought to him. His life hangs on the mercy of others.
That Szpilman was one of the “lucky ones” strikes a basic, raw chord of sadness. His torture is both physical and mental, as he discovers that his secret apartment holds a piano that, if he plays, will certainly alarm hostile residents nearby. He is a musician, and one can imagine the agony such a situation would entail.
Unlike “Schindler’s List,” “The Pianist” is not urgent in tone. Like its main character, the film is passive and, in that stroke, heartbreaking.
Many will say Polanski’s survival of the Holocaust — he escaped Treblinka as a child and wandered through the Polish countryside looking for hospitable families — had an impact on the film’s tone. It is undoubtedly felt here.
In one particular scene the camera swings over Szpilman as he wanders through the remains of the Warsaw ghetto and the sense of loneliness and desolation felt at that moment haunts the rest of the picture.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Brody lost 14 kilograms for the picture. A thin and fallow Brody seamlessly becomes Szpilman, and the transformation is disturbing in its accuracy. His very movements are as elegant as one would expect from a master pianist.
His acting portrays Szpilman as a humble man, noble in character, caught in a terrible situation, and after Szpilman experiences the second World War, the audience leaves the theater knowing the title “survivor” is merely one of humility and chance.