The Pianist

Roman Polanski’s standing as a millionaire fugitive from statutory-rape charges may or may not provide sufficient reason to boycott anything that bears his name, but no one in their right mind can deny that he’s a spellbinding filmmaker, a truth arguably never more vividly demonstrated than in The Pianist, Polanski’s hugely elegant and beautifully haunting Holocaust memoir.

Until now, Polanski has never broken his silence on either the murder of his partner and unborn child at the hands of Charles Manson’s gang, or his more-than-usually troubled childhood as a Jew in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw ghettoes. But The Pianist, utterly devastating in effect despite its entirely conventional dramatic structure, more than speaks for itself.

Adrien Brody, best noted to date for roles in Spike Lee’s Son of Sam and Ken Loach’s Bread & Roses, plays a quiet blinder in what is a largely quiet film, as the narrative demands: the entire latter part of the film witnesses his character, Polish Jew Wladyslaw Szpilman, on the run from German pursuers and hiding out in a variety of inordinately precarious situations, with the already pin-drop tension heightened immensely by Polanski’s utter mastery of the form.

Beforehand, The Pianist has already borne witness to the Nazi engulfing of Warsaw, the escalation of Jewish degradation in every way from the denial of footpath space to the withholding of food and medicine, and the deportation of Szpilman’s parents to a death camp while he ekes out a semblance of survival, often in rubble.

It’s the usual catalogue of Holocaust horror, but between Polanski’s ultra-assured direction and Brody’s near-silent heroics, it knocks the likes of Life Is Beautiful or Schindler’s List into the shade. Brody captures his character’s sense of silent shock so well that the viewer nearly becomes Szpilman, his enthusiastic young spirit and love of piano-playing shunted into a near-catatonic state where the preservation of silence might mean life or death. As with any Holocaust movie that’s ever worked, the death details are beyond chilling, but there is no audience manipulation whatsoever at work: merely the obvious first-hand experience of a genuine living survivor, convinced that the monumental monstrosity of the events depicted renders dialogue itself practically pointless.

Truly devastating viewing.