One of Polanski’s finest films, and a great WWII Holocaust drama about human resilience, and the beauty and power of music to overcome sheer adversity.

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Winning three Oscars including Best Director and the top prize at Cannes, The Pianist is Roman Polanski’s lifelong dream come true.

The Pianist somehow feels like an anomaly in Polanski’s body of work.  It is a historical drama about Nazi persecution in WWII Poland.  Yet it is undoubtedly his most personal film to date.  

A Jew himself, Polanski is born of Polish parents who were sent to concentration camp.  His maturity in handling a tough subject matter like the Holocaust can be observed by the manner in which he directed the film. Unlike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Polanski has shot The Pianist in full color.  

The Oscar-nominated cinematography by Pawel Edelman is stunning.  The elegant architecture of Warsaw radiates in many scenes, and the texture of every frame is so smooth that the film seems like a seamless storyboard of expertly-directed and edited sequences one after another, though not without one or two pacing issues.

“No-one play Chopin like you.”
“I hope that’s a compliment.”

“No-one play Chopin like you.”
“I hope that’s a compliment.”

There is one hauntingly exquisite scene showing Adrien Brody’s character, Szpilman, climbing over a wall.  As he makes it to the other side, the camera elevates slowly from behind the wall to reveal a desolate piece of snow-covered land with rows of wrecked houses either side of a wide, gaping path.  This scene represents the culmination of the impressive cinematographic vision of both Polanski and Edelman for The Pianist.

Adrien Brody cuts a display of sympathy.  One of the most apt casting decisions in recent years, Brody embodies not so much the physicality of the Jews, but rather a figure of restrained calmness that typifies Jews of that time.  

Knowing the fate of his race under the brutal stranglehold of Hitler, Szpilman somewhat escapes certain death, riding on luck most of the time, and the support of close ‘underground’ allies.

The Pianist is a realistic account of one of the darkest periods of humanity through the melancholic eyes of Adrien Brody’s Szpilman, one of Poland’s most well-known musicians.  

The film signifies a return to form for Polanski who had somewhat faded away in the late ’80s.  He may be past his prime, but once in a while, he is still capable of jolting fans of cinema awake with beautiful motion pictures like this.

Grade: A

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Trailer:

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