The Pianist

[jenna]

Warning: this was originally written for a class, so it does have spoilers, and i am using scarily correct sentence structure and capitilizations. But, it's a pretty significant movie, so i figured i'd share on here.

The Pianist is a film that was released in 2002, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrian Brody. The movie is based on the true story of the life of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist, and his survival through the German occupation of Poland during Wold War II. The Pianist, in my opinion, has a far more realistic feel to it than most films that deal with the Holocaust. Perhaps, this is due to the fact that Roman Polanski is a Polish survivor of the Holocaust himself and was able to draw on personal experience in the making of the movie.
The film begins with Wladyslaw Szpilman and his family coping with the increasingly difficult day to day stressors of being Jewish and living in Nazi occupied Poland. They confront issues such as bombs being dropped, only being allowed possession of a small amount of money, not being allowed in restaurants, and being forced to wear the Star of David. Through all of those events, the family manages to survive and even manages to find hope when they hear over the radio that the allies have joined in the fight against the Nazis.
However, soon after receiving this news, hope is shattered, and the family is moved into the ghetto. After that, Wladyslaw Szpilman narrowly escapes being sent of to the camps, unfortunately without the rest of his family. From this point on in the movie, Szpilman moves from hiding place to hiding place, barely surviving. The one thing that helps Szpilman to keep a bit of his sanity through all of this is his love of playing the piano. At the worst moments in the film, he is silently running his fingers over an imaginary keyboard and gets a brief moment of peace. His art also manages to save him physically as he actually manages to stir a Nazi with his music, and is saved.
Some would say that Brody did a very poor job in this film and gave a very flat emotionless performance. However, I feel that the lack of emotion was actually an accurate portrayal of the character and added to the film. Often, when people are exposed to serious trauma, they will experience a sense of numbing and become emotionally removed from the situation. People in this state, do not have extreme emotional responses to events. They just survive. This basic level of dissociated survival would have been a possible reaction to the events that Wladyslaw Szpilman survived. Therefore, the dis-jointed and flat way that Brody portrays his character is accurate and well done, and adds to the chilling nature of the movie.
The Pianist is chillingly realistic in several other ways as well. There are several moments of extreme violence and cruelty portrayed that I would have been quite happy to not have witnessed. However, those sorts of events were the sort of things that actually would have been going on during the Holocaust, rather than a bunch of happy Hollywood “feel good stuff.” The representations of the people who helped Szpilman were realistic as well. They were not shown as one-dimensional white-hatted doers of good. But rather, supposedly “good” people doing evil things, and supposedly “evil” people doing good things.
In summation, The Pianist is realistic, gritty, and haunting. It is the sort of movie that everyone may not want to see, but that everyone should see. It teaches lessons that many people probably would prefer not to know, both about a time in history, and about the nature of humanity. However, lessons like the ones taught in this movie are important to learn. Polanski did the world a great service by choosing to confront the demons of his childhood in this film, so that others may be able to have a deeper level of understanding of the events of this time period and of the human will to survive.