It is ridiculous, in my opinion, to suggest, as some critics do, that there have been too many Holocaust films. First off, nobody forces viewers to watch a film about any topic after they've reached their saturation point. Secondly, World War II and the Holocaust, taken together, are the most important and horrific events in the history of humankind. Centuries from now, historians and art-lovers will be grateful for the record that was made now, while the memories remain fresh, and will, in fact, wish that we had recorded the stories more thoroughly. There are ten million such stories and the 170 or so films on the subject don't begin to scratch the surface. The Pianist is probably not the best Holocaust film ever made, but it's among the best and a very welcome addition. Polánski's vision is bleak and powerful and does not wince from showing the reality of the terrible events, while also personalizing it in the story of one individual. Polánski, a survivor of the Holocaust himself, was usually attuned to this story and uniquely qualified to give it depth. This was the film that Polánski's entire life had prepared him to make.

Historical Background: I think that it's safe to say that Roman Polánski would have settled for a good deal less excitement in his life. He has had unthinkable tragedies forced on him twice in his life and brought a third one upon himself. Polánski was born Raimund Leibling on August 18th, 1933 in Paris France to Ryszard Liebling, a Polish Jew, and Bula Katz, a Roman Catholic. His parents moved back to Ryszard's native country, Poland, in 1937, where they reassumed their Polish surname, Polánski. When Poland was invaded by Germany, Polánski and his parents were incarcerated in the Cracow Ghetto. Both parents were later shipped off to a concentration camp. His mother was killed there while four months pregnant. Polánski's father survived the war. Polánski himself escaped from the ghetto and spent most of the war years wandering the Polish countryside, staying with Catholic families and getting his first exposure to films (mostly German) at the cinemas.

After the war, he was reunited with his father. He started study at a technical school but in the fifties, turned to acting, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's film Pokolenie in 1955. He also began a course of study at the Lodz Film School in Poland, graduating in 1959, having already directed a couple of shorts. His first feature film, Knife in the Water (1962), was noteworthy for being the first film made in Poland after World War II that was not about the war. Polánski received an Academy Award nomination for this film.

Though already a rising star in Polish filmmaking, Polánski moved to Paris, manifesting that international disposition that was to characterize him throughout his career. Polánski would ultimately become fluent in five languages: Polish, French, English, Russian, and Italian. In Paris, he made the acquaintance of scriptwriter Gerard Brach, with whom he would work repeatedly throughout his career. He and Brach teamed up for two very strong films in England, Repulsion (1965), a dark story about alienation and insanity, and Cul-de-Sac (1966), a spine-tingling thriller. Both films won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, the former Silver and the latter a Golden Bear. Polánski was now well-established internationally. He followed those successes with The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), through which he met the actress Sharon Tate, whom he married in London in January of 1968.

In 1968, Polánski responded to the lure of Hollywood and quickly established his reputation among American filmgoers with the classic psychological thriller, Rosemary's Baby (1968). The triumph of that success was utterly shattered when, on August 9th 1969, Sharon, then eight months pregnant, was brutally murdered by Charles Manson and his cult followers. Tate was stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen before being sliced open Three other friends of Polánski and a young boy were also murdered in this terrible episode that reverberated all across the international media. The emotionally devastated Polánski returned to Europe immediately after Tate's funeral. Back in England, he filmed a well-regarded version of Macbeth (1971).

He returned once more to Hollywood in 1974 and directed possibly his greatest film, Chinatown (1974), starring Jack Nicholson. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for that effort. He then returned to France to make The Tenant (1976), another worthy film. Back in Hollywood in 1977, at the height of his glory, Polánski arranged a bathing suit photo shoot in Jack Nicholson's vacant home for a thirteen-year-old aspiring actress on behalf of the French edition of Vogue magazine. The girl's mother, also an actress, optimistically relying on Polánski 's reputation, discovered that her daughter had ended up in the hot-tub with Polánski, had been drugged with alcohol and Quaalude, and forced into nonconsensual intercourse and other sex acts. Polánski urged the girl, "Don't tell your mom," but she was overheard by her sister describing the event to a friend over the telephone. Polanski was arrested and, in a plea bargain, admitted to unlawful sex with a minor. He fled the country before sentencing and has not set foot in America since, as he would be subject to arrest and up to fifty years in prison. When he later won an Oscar for The Pianist, he could not appear to pick up the statue.

Back in Europe, Polánski returned to form in a French/U.K. co-production Tess (1979), among his best films and recipient of another Academy Award nomination. The film was dedicated to Sharon Tate who had left a copy of the book on which the film was based on her nightstand, before leaving London, along with a note to Polánski suggesting that the story would make a wonderful film. During the filming of Tess, Polánski began a relationship with Nastassja Kinsky (see Paris, Texas), who would have been nineteen or twenty at the time. Apparently Polánski had not yet had his fill of companionship with overly young females. The relationship was short-lived.

Tess was Polánski's last truly great film until The Pianist (2002). The best of his intervening films were Frantic (1988), with Harrison Ford, and Death and the Maiden (1994). Polánski directed a version of Oliver Twist in the summer of 2004. Polánski films are known for black humor, violence, and suspense, centering on alienated characters facing tragic circumstances. Polánski's view with respect to violence in cinema is one with which I wholeheartedly concur: "You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity."

The Story: This film was based on an autobiography by Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman entitled Death of a City. Szpilman (Adrien Brody) had been playing Chopin at a Warsaw radio station when exploding German bombs signaled the invasion of Poland by Germany and the beginning of World War II. Forced to abandon the studio, Szpilman heads home. Along the way, he has a chance meeting with a friend, Jurek (Michal Zebrowski) and a beautiful young cellist, Dorota (Emilia Fox). Once the German soldiers march into Warsaw, Szpilman and his family are forced to submit to increasingly inhumane restrictions imposed on Jews. Soon, Jews are prohibited from eating in certain restaurants, sitting on park benches, or walking through public parks. Later, they are required to wear identifying armbands, walk in the gutter, and bow to passing German soldiers. Szpilman's family consists of his father (Frank Finlay), mother (Maureen Lipman), vitriolic brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard), and two sisters, Regina (Julia Rayner) and Halina (Jessica Kate Meyer). Under the strain and humiliation, the family members understandably quarrel over such particulars as where to hide their money.

Soon, the Jews of Warsaw – some 360,000 of them – are forced to move into a designated area that becomes known as the Warsaw ghetto. Szpilman's family of six has to make do with two small rooms, but their mother insists on maintaining an upbeat attitude. Conditions in the ghetto deteriorate rapidly. They watch a brick wall being built to enclose the ghetto. Some of the Jews are recruited to serve as a Jewish police force, collaborating with the Nazis. One of these recruits, Majorek (Daniel Caltagirone), an old friend of Wladyslaw, invites him to join as well, but Wladyslaw refuses. The younger members of the Szpilman family are able to survive by getting work permits that allow them to perform menial jobs for the Nazis. Wladyslaw finds work as a pianist at one of the Ghetto restaurants. They witness horrifying scenes of brutality, such as a crippled man being thrown by the Nazis from a third-floor balcony and the rest of the family being forced to run down a street while being shot down for target practice. A boy trying to escape through a hole in the wall is beaten to death. A woman and an old man fight over a pot of beans. When it drops on the ground, the old man drops down and begins licking it up like a dog.

Before long, the Nazis have launched their "Final Solution." Jews from the ghetto, other than those capable of labor, are shipped off to death camps on trains. Wladyslaw is yanked from his family by Majorek, as they are being loaded onto one such train, though Szpilman hardly knows whether to view his "rescue" as a blessing, so pained is he to see his family hauled away.

Wladyslaw ultimately escapes from the ghetto. He is helped both by Dorota and members of the Polish resistance, but he is a liability to them and forced to hide out in locked rooms and secret hideouts. He has to remain silent and often lacks for food for days. From the window of one of these hideouts, Szpilman can see the ghetto and watches the courageous uprising and ultimate slaughter of the inhabitants. He is helpless to intervene. As liberation approaches, Szpilman's existence becomes even more precarious. The water stops running from the tap. As the city is turned to rubble, chaos and famine are enemies as much as the Nazis. His discovery in a hiding place by a German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), becomes the final dramatic highlight of the film.

Themes: The greatest challenge in making a film about the Holocaust is how to handle the depressing nature of the subject matter. One has to respect the horror of the sacrifice of millions of people but audiences can only take so much of a beating about the negative aspects of human nature. Many Holocaust stories focus on survivors, partly because they are the ones who lived to tell their stories, but the reality is that there were far more victims than survivors. Telling the story of the survivors may be uplifting, in the end, and something of a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, but the reality is that the survivor stories were the anomalies. Then, secondly, the director and scriptwriter also have to struggle with what kind of implicit message is appropriate with respect to why that person survived and not others. The temptation, given the natural thirst for heroes among film audiences, is to suggest the person's survival was due to exceptional resourcefulness, heroism, or intelligence. While such factors undoubtedly sometimes played a role, Polánski and many other Holocaust survivors attribute their respective emergences from the horror mainly to dumb luck. Polánski is at no small trouble to illustrate the randomness of the Nazi violence. In one scene, a Nazi officer orders every fourth man to step forward from a line of men in the ghetto and proceeds to shoot each of them in the head. In another scene, Szpilman is on his way to a death camp with the rest of his family, but is suddenly spotted by one of the Jewish policemen – a friend – and pulled out of the group being shipped off. The moral of the story, if it has one, is that none of us should be too smug about our capacity to survive when extremes of violence erupt. The most important controllable factor in survival is to nip political movements such as Nazism in the bud. Once Nazism reached a certain critical momentum, survival became a crapshoot for all.

Assuming that Polánski was faithful to Szpilman's autobiography, Szpilman was surprisingly hard on Jewish collaborators and evenhanded or better with the Polish people and even the Nazis (with the positive portrayal of Captain Hosenfeld). Except perhaps for one character, the Polish people are portrayed as ever-willing to aid a Jew in distress – as best as they were able. Yet, after the end of the War, anti-Jewish sentiment continued to dominate politics in Poland under the Communist regime. This story is, however, based on one man's actual experience and doesn't represent a complete cross-section of the various categories of people involved.

All of us need to understand that what happened in Europe from 1939-45 is not merely an aberration – it lies within the range of possibilities inherent in human nature. It's not enough to decry those evil Nazis, as if they were nonhuman. We all need to be maintaining a grip on our own aggressive impulses. Already, in Iraq, for example, an estimated 100,000 civilians have been killed by the American military initiative (according to a report in Lancet by physicians from John Hopkins). Very few of them would have felt their deaths a fair price to pay for the ousting of Saddam Hussein, especially because there is no credible evidence presently that a new era of stability is about to blossom over that country. The death toll is likely to continue to climb steadily as the war escalates.

Production Values: Szpilman's autobiography was published shortly after the war but the Communist government in Poland would not permit its publication for several years. It didn't fully comport with the official interpretation of the war years. Szpilman remained in Warsaw and continued to perform as a pianist, helping in his way with the reconstruction of the Polish life and psyche. The real Wladyslaw Szpilman died in 2000 at the age of eighty-eight.

The beauty of the script is that it maintains perfect balance between the larger context and the personalized story of Szpilman. Polánski never loses contact with either side of the story. The best films about the Holocaust are those that relate the horrific events to one or a few individuals because the scope of the topic taken as a whole is simply too much for the human mind to fathom.

The cinematographer for the film was Pawel Edelman. He uses few gimmicks, which is what you'd hope would be the case in a film with such somber subject matter, but the sets are marvelous, the shot-angles varied, and the shot composition very well-conceived. There is no need for surrealism since the subject matter is so absurd and inconceivable that it creates its own inherent sense of unreality, without visual urging. One interesting tactic, however, is that Edelman gradually drains the color intensity from his shots over the course of the film, as the circumstances deteriorate from the lively, cultured life of a bourgeoisie family near the beginning, to the ghetto, and finally to a Warsaw reduced to rubble. We seem to be watching through Szpilman's eyes, a technique for which Polánski is renowned, known as his "subjective camera." The Pianist was shot mostly in Poland but partly in Prague and a German studio.

Adrien Brody's performance is not only the highlight of the film, but its essence. His forceful but understated performance reflects the emotional deadening that one experiences after years of nearly unendurable hardships. He is reduced from a self-assured, slightly aloof artist to a shell of a man, with little evidence of his previous cultured humanity. Brody was down to a weight of 130 pounds for the final scenes of the film! Brody won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance here. The best of Brody's other work includes The Thin Red Line (1998) and Summer of Sam (1999). Brody is the only performer who gets a lot of screen time in this film, though many others deliverer strong performances in supporting roles. I thought Ed Stoppard very effective as Spzilman's brother, Henryk and Emilia Fox perfect as Dorata.

Bottom-Line: My copy of The Pianist was VHS. There is also a two-disk special-edition, DVD version available. One extra is a 39-minute documentary in which Polánski recalls some of the humiliation to which the Nazis subjected his own father. There's a making of the film documentary as well. Brody talks about his preparation and performance. There's an assortment of filmographies, photo galleries, posters, and the trailer.

When you sit down to watch this film, be prepared for some gruesome violence. Polánski doesn't harp on it or render it unnecessarily gory, but he also doesn't sugarcoat it. You'll see people shot in the head and corpses lying about and other acts of extreme cruelty. All of us need to feel a bit of the pain to which these victims were subjected. The Pianist is in English except for a few lines of German (for which subtitles appear). The running time is 150 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age