GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW

Reporting from Cannes last May, a misguided Hollywood Reporter correspondent complained of this film that it "recounts its tales of horror and triumph, but never makes the viewer experience them." In a way, I must agree with Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt; the cinema is indeed an insufficient instrument for making one experience the humiliation, oppression, and terror of life in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. I should expect that one might be grateful for that. I only cite this comment because it is the most boneheaded out of many boneheaded things that have been said about this masterful film — a more common (and really, when you get right down to it, more hateful) snipe is that this whole, you know, Holocaust theme has been cinematically done, you know, to death. Jeez, I can't figure out how some people think. But such displays of ignorance, aside from being frightening, underscore just how necessary this film's existence is.

Based on a memoir by Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, the movie is quite meticulous in showing how the Nazi occupation of Poland played out for the Jews there; first, their basic civil liberties were eroded; then, their movements and the public and private places in which they were welcome were restricted; at the same time, they were subject to routine humiliation by occupying forces. We watch as the cultured Szpilman family (Wladyslaw is a hugely talented musician) tries and, for the most part, succeeds in sticking together as it is moved to the ghetto and its filthy, ridiculous simulation/reduction of everyday existence; but throughout, everyone (except Wladyslaw's angry brother) has a sort of shell-shocked aspect.

A fleeting allusion to Kafka in the movie's Warsaw ghetto sequence is hardly incidental; just as The Metamorphosis and The Trial begin with their protagonists' lives turned upside down, so The Pianist opens as German explosives shatter the windows of the studio where Wladyslaw is playing Chopin. "Normal" life here is not defined until the film's end — when it is, of course, a wholly transformed normality from what there was before. In Polanski's film, after an accident of fate separates Wladyslaw from his family as they are being put on a train to Treblinka, his life takes a truly Kafkaesque turn as he goes into a series of hiding places; constant tension is replaced by near-constant emptiness and deprivation. Stick-thin, bearded, clawing at a can of food that he knows he can't open with his hands, Wladyslaw (whose portrayal by Adrien Brody is about the best movie acting has to offer) has become the insect Samsa (a role that Polanski played in Paris) of Kafka's famous story. How he is delivered from this state is one of the most quietly moving stories in survivor literature, and now the cinema. Polanski tells this story with all of his cinematic mastery and no cinematic trickery. The lack of melodrama and sentimentality make this movie a sort of spiritually cleansing movie-watching — yes, here the word fits — experience.

— Glenn Kenny