 Tagline: Music was his passion. Survival was his masterpiece. "The best picture of the year." -Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune Nominatedifor 7 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and winner of 3, The Pianist stars Oscar winner Adrien Brodyiin the true-life story of brilliant pianist and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, the most acclaimed young musician of his time until his promising career was interrupted by the onset of World War II. This powerful, ultimately triumphant film follows Szpilman's heroic and inspirational journey of survival with the unlikely help fromia sympathetic German officer. A truly unforgettable epic, testifying to both the power of hope and the resiliency of the human spirit, The Pianist is a miraculous tale of survival masterfully brought to life by visionary filmmaker Roman Polanski in his most personal movie ever. Storyline: A brilliant pianist, a Polish Jew, witnesses the restrictions Nazis place on Jews in the Polish capital, from restricted access to the building of the Warsaw ghetto. As his family is rounded up to be shipped off to the Nazi labor camps, he escapes deportation and eludes capture by living in the ruins of Warsaw. Written by Anonymous Cast Notes: Adrien Brody (Wladyslaw Szpilman), Thomas Kretschmann (Captain Wilm Hosenfeld), Frank Finlay (Father), Maureen Lipman (Mother), Emilia Fox (Dorota), Ed Stoppard [I] (Henryk), Julia Rayner [I] (Regina), Jessica Kate Meyer (Halina), Michal Zebrowski (Jurek), Wanja Mues (SS Slapping Father), Richard Ridings (Mr. Lipa), Nomi Sharron (Feather Woman), Anthony Milner (Man Waiting to Cross), Lucy Skeaping (Street Musician), Roddy Skeaping (Street Musician). User Comment: Christopher Mulrooney Los Angeles • In the early days of Technicolor, Graham Greene wondered if it really could be used to depict the seedy suit, the sweat-stained hat. Szpilman escapes from the Warsaw Ghetto, is taken to an unused apartment, and there beholds a nice clean sofa like a desideratum of bliss, an island in a sea of schmutz, just the fabric and the comfort of it, without any particular emphasis. A friend of mine in the business warned me not to write the following remarks, fearing they would result in some harm to Polanski. I think that is absurd and improbable. Is Spielberg really as terrible as all that? From the first scene, Polanski is on new ground (Chinatown, The Tenant, Frantic, all had to be made first, for this to exist). Szpilman is calmly playing Chopin in a Warsaw Radio studio when the bombs start falling. First the window in the booth is shattered, then it's imploded. What follows is a different film. Where he had begun way out ahead of everything with a characteristic Hitchcockism, Polanski now must return to square one and the basic incompetence of Schindler's List. This is heroic, somebody had to do it. Scene by scene, each scene is brought to the limits of the possible, and left with a definition somewhere in its depths (Father stepping into the gutter, Szpilman's little hand gesture as he waves off the piano). Much later is an oblique reference, I think, to a filmmaker one feels has profited from other people's misfortune (Godard says Mrs. Schindler never received the money promised her for Spielberg's film). The point of departure is Doctor Zhivago. Polanski's art in a larger, strategic or formal sense, has to find a valuable means of articulating a film on two levels at once. Again and again, he returns to the mark set at the opening, in battle scenes bristling with photojournalistic accuracy. Perhaps it would be easiest to regard The Pianist as a memoir faithfully filmed incorporating a response to two films of titanic ineptitude, the other being Saving Private Ryan. Polanski has his own tale to tell, and there is The Painted Bird. It seems a noble gesture to have made this particular film. The articulating point is taken from Welles' The Stranger: "Who but a Nazi would deny Marx was a German, because he was a Jew?" This becomes a film about Poland and especially Warsaw (Szpilman's memoir was originally entitled "Death of a City"). Essentially it's a "mille fleurs" pattern, a picture of this, a picture of that, leading to the progressive revelation of music as an art. The ghetto is a ridiculous traffic jam at first. While waiting to cross the tracks, Jews are requested to dance. "Judentanzplatz" is what a German soldier calls it. In the ghetto cafe, Szpilman's playing is interrupted by a customer who wants to test gold coins on his tabletop, dropping them and clinking them one by one, till he hears a dud. The grandest scene has Szpilman alone in blocks of bombed-out houses, finding a last refuge in an uppermost attic nook. He is discovered by a rather laconic German officer and obliged to play for him. At this point, the actor Adrien Brody had actually lost much weight, his hair and beard are overgrown, his hands appear gnarled (his facial expression and the sound he makes when, stiff with inanition, he is forced to jump out a window, are uncannily true). Nevertheless, he sits down and opens with parallel octaves, warming into Chopin's bubbling rivers of voices and music, an all but articulate speech, and Polanski doesn't miss a note of it. The officer is moved. Later he brings food, and finally gives Szpilman his overcoat. But this only prepares the next scene. The Russians have entered Warsaw. Seeing Szpilman the bearded Christ in a German officer's overcoat, a Polish woman shouts "German! German!" (just as another earlier had shouted "Jew! Jew!") and the Russian troops start taking potshots at him. "Don't shoot!", he says, "I'm Polish!" "What's with the f.ing coat?", says one of them. Szpilman replies, "I'm cold." And before you know it, he's back playing the piano for Warsaw Radio, looking a good deal like Horowitz (one photograph of Szpilman suggests a resemblance to Jack Benny in To Be Or Not To Be). The sound editing registers the halting small-arms fire in the street turning into a more assured avenging burst; the unforgettable sound of troops marching across a cobblestone square; bombs, artillery fire at such a distance; the nuances of the performance. Contemporary footage at the outset gives another mark Polanski aims at and returns to several times (rather than dissolving from, etc.). The German officer is introduced rather shockingly with the famous shot at the end of Lord Of The Flies. As Szpilman plays, that shaft of light athwart the dark studio at the end of Fellini's Intervista plays over the piano. Warsaw at night, blue and inviting, after the horrors of the ghetto; Szpilman wandering the ruins, like Keaton in The Navigator. Summary: Death of a City IMDb Rating (07/25/14): 8.5/10 from 349,320 users Top 250: #42 IMDb Rating (10/15/07): 8.4/10 from 69,017 users Top 250: #52 IMDb Rating (05/01/03): 8.7/10 from 8,084 users Top 250: #30
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