The Pianist

Pianist/composer Wladyslaw Szpilman was the only member of his family to survive the horrors the Nazis perpetrated on the Jews. His parents, his brother and his two sisters perished in a concentration camp, a fate he escaped only because an acquaintance he had once asked for help pulled him out of a line of people being herded onto a railroad car. It's this kind of blind luck and unexpected, inconsistent kindness that characterize his survival through six years of German occupation of his native Poland.

The Pianist begins as the Nazis are invading, before anyone knows how bad things are really going to become. We watch as the noose tightens. First, Jews are forbidden to walk in the park or sit on benches. Then they must relocate to the Warsaw Ghetto. Then they're packed into boxcars, sent away to a fate they've only heard whispered rumors about. As indignity becomes outrage becomes atrocity, the Szpilman family see their comfortable life turn into a nightmare of terror and deprivation.

Director Roman Polanski, himself a Polish Holocaust survivor, has crafted a remarkable film out of events that must have been incredibly painful for him to even think about. He gives us an unflinching, unsentimental portrayal of the large and small cruelties of life in Warsaw during the war, but with a detachment that keeps the whole thing from becoming maudlin. We see everything through Szpilman's eyes. With him we watch his family get taken away, we look on from a distance as the Warsaw ghetto uprising bursts forth and is quickly quelled, we're dragged into the action as battles encroach on his hiding spots. Polanski, cinematographer Pawel Edelman and production designer Allan Starski let the color scheme set much of the mood, shifting gradually from nostalgic sepia tones at the beginning of the film to muddy browns as Szpilman toils in the ghetto and bleak, chilly grays as he shivers and waits through another winter.

Adrien Brody, in his Oscar-winning role, is brilliantly restrained and subtle through most of the film. He shows us everything his character goes through in simple, honest expressions, small gestures, wordless glances. Szpilman used the memory of his music to help him survive through long years of loneliness, hunger and cold, and Brody's performance makes that real. He does seem less comfortable in the bigger emotional scenes; when he's trudging down an abandoned Warsaw street, wailing for the loss of the world he knew, it felt jarring.

The Pianist is a sad story and unconventional in that Szpilman is a fairly passive hero. He doesn't fight back, doesn't save anyone but himself. His only triumph was making it through alive, and yet that is a remarkable enough feat. It is, simply, a story of survival, and therefore, a story of hope.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3.5 out of 4 bananas