....and we're back with another Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
I'm finishing out the year 2002 with Roman Polanski's Holocaust drama The Pianist, starring Adrien Brody in the role that won him his first Oscar. Been meaning to watch this one for 24 years now....
Based on true events, The Pianist is a story of survival in the face of unspeakable inhumanity. Professional musician Wladyslaw Szpilman was a flourishing piano player in 1930s Poland when the Germans invaded and forced the half million or so Polish Jews out of their homes and into a tiny ghetto area of Warsaw, before sending most of them off to be enslaved and murdered in concentration camps. Szpilman was separated from his family by an acquaintance who was now a Jewish police officer, smuggled out of the ghetto, and set up in a safe house by non-Jewish Polish friends. He spent over a year in hiding, battling starvation and isolation, before his apartment building was destroyed by tank fire, and from there hid among the Warsaw ruins, barely surviving on scraps, until the end of the war. We later learn that he lived out the rest of his life (until the year 2000) in Warsaw, resuming his career as a pianist.
A Holocaust survivor himself, Polanski presents this extraordinary story very matter-of-factly, depicting the events without any of the usual Hollywood frills. Nothing about Szpilman's survival or the horrific events he lived through are glamorized, and the film is that much more immersive for it. Through his eyes we witness appalling acts of cruelty and violence committed seemingly without rhyme or reason, such as a scene where German soldiers march into a building across the street and climb several flights of stairs just to execute an entire Jewish family at their dinner table and throw an old wheelchair-bound man off the balcony. Witnessing the entire dreadful episode, the Szpilmans dare not react to such horrors, lest they draw attention to themselves, and thus the camera doesn't react either. We're shown these things exactly as they happened, giving the film the feel of a documentary. There's no need for the filmmakers to take a side; the events are grotesque enough in and of themselves for us to know which side is the correct one.
Brody's Oscar-winning performance is similarly un-glamorous. He performs most of it through body language and facial expression, conveying Szpilman's masked horror and barely-maintained composure. While I wouldn't rank this performance quite on the level of Daniel Day-Lewis's in Gangs of New York (another nominee that year), Brody does some great work here while playing everything close to the chest.
The film was mostly shot on various backlots, with the Warsaw ghetto recreated in painstaking detail on the site of a former Soviet Army base - there's a shot late in the film depicting Szpilman wandering around the demolished city that echoes the famous battlefield shot in Gone With the Wind, block after block after block of ruined buildings stretching for a seeming eternity. I'm not sure if any of that was CG-enhanced, but it looks absolutely authentic and devastating.
At a time when American politics feel closer than ever to that of 1930s Germany, when government agents are simply permitted to shoot people in the streets without fear of punishment, a film like The Pianist is a difficult watch in 2026, but a necessary one. Movies like this, Schindler's List and 12 Years a Slave should be required viewing for high school US History classes to help ensure future generations never again allow such ghastly atrocities to take place, whether on US soil or elsewhere.
I give The Pianist ***1/2 out of ****.
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