The Pianist (2002) * * * 1/2

Directed by:  Roman Polanski

Starring:  Adrien Brody, Emilia Fox, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Maureen Lipman

The Pianist tells the true story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Spzilman (Brody-Oscar winner for Best Actor for the role) who survived World War II by the skin of his teeth.    When the German bombs first hit Poland on September 1, 1939, Spzilman, a gifted young classical pianist, was performing on Polish radio.    He continued playing even as the building was shaking around him.    He must perform.   The rest must have seemed surreal.    What happened next must have seemed like something out of dystopian novel.

Spzilman, a Jewish man, makes a comfortable living as a famed pianist, but in the eyes of the Nazis he is just another Jew to be exterminated.    They didn't care about his prowess.    They didn't care his family was prominent.    They were simply a few more people to be killed.     We witness the unfolding of what would have to millions of other Jews across Europe during the six years of World War II.    The Spzilmans are stripped of their home, possessions, and are soon gathered up in a small ghetto.    The next step will be on a train to a death camp.    Thanks to incredible good fortune, he is pulled from the line boarding the death camp trains by a family friend and spends the next five years surviving in what remains of the Warsaw ghetto.    Spzilman hides out in various homes of non-Jews and members of the Polish resistance.    He spends his days and nights hiding, starving, and frightened; moving from one hideout to another in the desperate hopes of outlasting the war.    We know what eventually happened to the Nazis, but Spzilman does not.  

Brody, whose role contains sparse dialogue once he begins hiding, is a masterstroke of powerful, non-verbal expression.     We feel his pain, his sorrow over losing his loved ones to genocide, and his innate instinct for survival without him having to say it.     He comes to a crossroads when one of the apartments in which he hides has a piano.    He knows he cannot play it, but he desires to not just because he loves music, but because it would return him to a happier time before the war.    It is yet another cruel twist of the knife for him.

This is Brody's movie, but more Polanski's, who has such an insightful, knowing connection to the material because he is a Holocaust survivor himself whose mother perished in the death camps.    He has an empathetic instinct for Spzilman and a realistic view of the horrors surrounding him.    The film does not have a flair for the dramatic, like Schindler's List, but instead has a melancholy documentary feel to it.    To Polanski (who won an unlikely Best Director Oscar for this film), The Pianist is a chance to show the Holocaust in stark terms where survival was much less likely than death.    Spzilman, with some help (including from a sympathetic Nazi officer), survived the war, but surely did not forget his struggle.  

The Pianist is a Holocaust movie, but not one in which good finds a way to triumph over evil.    With so many dead at the hands of the Axis Powers and the Final Solution, any sparse triumphs of good over evil were islands unto themselves.    We can say even though the Allies won the war and the Nazis were thwarted, so many lost.    Polanski understands that and shows us exactly how.