The Pianist

Yesterday i went to british council library to browse.While going thru the dvd list I came across the Pianist.I heard a lot about the movie so i thought i will give it a try.Over all i liked the movie.Here is my take on the film


ladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a Jewish pianist living, with his family, in Poland just prior to WWII. As the Nazis crack down on Jews throughout the city, Szpilman finds his life and family taken away from him piece by piece until he is reduced to a shell of a man, living in the Warsaw ghetto. Through various acts of kindness by strangers, he manages to escape his prison and survive on the ruined streets of the city. As Szpilman waits for the Allies to charge in and finish off the Nazis once and for all, he is forced to live in the attic of an abandoned house, nourished only by scraps of food and water that he finds lying about the war-ravaged city.

Throughout Roman Polanski's (Chinatown) less than astounding new film, all I could think about during the long, dull stretches of nothingness was this: Why that title? Why give this film a title that will cause anyone under the age of fifteen (physically or emotionally) to giggle like a schoolgirl? That the protagonist is a pianist is such an unimportant aspect of the story that they could just have easily have titled the movie The Jew, The Survivor, or heck, The Hunted. If you're going to risk calling your film The Pianist, thus ensuring that nearly every grown male in the country will avoid it like the latest Merchant-Ivory production, why not spend just a little bit of time on your lead character's love of music?

Actually, a better question might be this: Why not spend a little time on your lead character's personality in general? By the end of The Pianist, all we know about Szpilman is that his soul was as pure as the driven snow, he was a Jew, and we're told from time to time that he really likes the piano (I counted a total of four times when we actually see our hero playing the piano, and only the final such scene in any way conveys that he truly loves the instrument). The supporting characters are little more than archetypes: the friendly strangers, the fiery younger brother, the evil Nazis, and so on and so forth. A personality seems to be as highly prized a commodity as bread and potatoes in The Pianistóand as rare.

Contributing nicely to the disinterest caused by our characters' lack of depth is Polanski's lack of flair behind the camera. The once-great director seems to have lost his touch whilst in exile; this is one of the most unimaginatively shot films that I've seen in quite some time. Filled to overflowing with dull, static shots of carnage and waste, the film seems to be trying to project a feeling of isolation and sorrow, but it didn't inspire any such feelings in me (or if it did, those feelings were in regard to the state of the movie, not the subject). Even the horrors the Jews were forced to endure during this tragic moment in history were not enough to make me care about what was happening during this film.

Speaking of those horrors, Polanski and company do throw a few of them into the film, here and there, apparently to keep us from forgetting that the Nazis are still there, even if all we're seeing is a tired, hungry, bearded man stumbling through ruined streets in search of bread. The sight of a group of Nazi soldiers hurling an old man in a wheelchair from a window and then gunning down a family in cold-blood is effective, as is a scene where a soldier picks a group of men at random to kill, making them lie down and then shooting them in the back of the head. Yet, moments like these are few and far between. Rather than showing us the horrors of the Holocaust and the War, the movie chooses to focus on one man. This isn't a bad idea in its own right, but if you're going to focus on that one man, you need to make him into someone we can either relate to or care about. Watching a man run around the streets drinking water from a mop bucket, thanking everyone in sight, and occasionally playing the piano in his mind simply doesn't qualify.

Adrien Brody (The Thin Red Line) does what he can with the underwritten character (strange that the character should be underwritten since this is based on a true story), but that generally amounts to looking malnourished and scampering around abandoned (and often shockingly phony looking) buildings. The supporting cast acts appropriately evil or sympathetic, depending on the situation, but no one is given much of anything to work with. It's like watching a group of hard-working actors on parade. They enter stage left, state their peace, and exit stage right, never to be heard from again. Some might say it's to the film's benefit that we don't always witness the fate of the characters, but in this case it made the story feel incomplete.

Perhaps what bothered me the most about The Pianist was that it was nothing new. We've all seen countless Holocaust movies, many of them far more expertly crafted than this one, so what makes this one so special? Why the outpouring of critical praise from all corners? That's not to say The Pianist is a bad movieóI can understand how some people might hold it in some esteemóbut it's also nothing special. Despite the best of intentions from a director who lived through this tragedy and some hard work from the cast, this is really nothing more than a mediocre film, unimaginatively directed, uninteresting, and a disappointing experience all around.