Overall Rating
  Awesome: 67.19%
Worth A Look: 15.63%
Average: 13.28%
Pretty Bad: 3.13%
Total Crap: 0.78%
6 reviews, 92 user ratings
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| Pianist, The |
by The Ultimate Dancing Machine
"Mr. Polanski's Opus"
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Fiction writers who go epic are often said to be attempting the Great American Novel—a not altogether complimentary term that tends to imply pretentiousness and overreaching rather than tangible achievement. In the same sense, Roman Polanski has just attempted the Great Polish Movie, a two-and-a-half hour number about the Nazi occupation of Poland and the ensuing slaughter of the Jewish populace. It is the kind of movie—big, serious, and “inspiring”--that awards juries love; not surprisingly, THE PIANIST has already taken the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. But I think the approbation of the Cannes jury was effectively an “A” for effort. Though undeniably well produced, this is a sterile, standoffish film that inadvertently trivializes a very big subject.Based on true events, it’s told through the viewpoint of one Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a young Jewish pianist who escaped death by leading a subterranean existence under the noses of the occupying army, eventually finding a savior in the person of—incredibly—a Nazi (Thomas Kretschmann) who liked music.
Polanski, working from a script by Ronald Harwood, opens The Pianist in media res, with bombs falling on Warsaw and the Szpilman family trying to escape harm’s way. Have no fear, though, that you won’t get your bearings, as the characters don’t have dialogue, only exposition. We’re talking about the kind of screenwriting where people continually read newspaper articles at each other so we’ll know what’s happening, where when one character claims that x-number of Jews live in Warsaw, another corrects the figure. Harwood’s script is “well made” in the worst sense of the term—it moves from Point A to Point B smoothly enough, but like everything else in The Pianist, it feels processed.
Polanski doesn’t spare us the unpleasantness of the Nazi occupation. The Nazis depicted here are a bloodthirsty lot, given to shooting Jews for no special reason—but their mindless brutality is overdone. Polanski’s Nazis come across as stupid jocks; he’s so determined to portray them as the bad guys that he forgets he doesn’t need to convince us. They’re cartoonishly one-dimensional, to the extent that they’re listed in the credits as, for example, “The SS Officer who slaps the father” and “SS Officer who shoots Benek.” From the evidence of this movie, you’d be hard-pressed to explain how these yahoos took over one of the biggest industrial nations in the world. (It is perhaps telling that Hitler is never mentioned.) They’re such buffoons that when Kretschmann appears in the third act, you know he’s the Good Nazi simply cause he doesn’t immediately start slapping Jews around.
The Warsaw Ghetto featured in The Pianist is an antiseptic place, so garishly lit that in many scenes the actors scarcely cast shadows. You begin to suspect that you’re watching the Masterpiece Theatre Holocaust—even the bodies lying on the ground seem calculatedly placed. The art direction is simply too clean; everything tends to look artificial. When a haggard Szpilman emerges into the daylight to find his city destroyed, it’s an impressive sight, but you’re aware that you’re looking at a very expensive set. It’s an odd fault from the man who gave us the claustrophobically bloody MacBeth.
Szpilman, competently played by Adrien Brody, never really comes alive as a character. He’s a lover of music—we’re reminded of this whenever he overhears a snatch of music and a beatific expression falls over his face—but he’s so passive a character that his passions fail to move us. It’s not that Szpilman is a helpless onlooker. Under the circumstances, what else could he be? But Polanski needed to compensate for this by giving him dimension—here he fails. We’re given far too many scenes where Szpilman stares out of windows at terrible things happening in the street. (His physical deterioration provides another example of too-perfect art direction: he’s supposed to look emaciated, but he seems merely unshaven.) THE PIANIST has virtually nothing to say about the power of music, as Szpilman’s talent becomes just a vague catchall symbol for What They Can’t Take Away From Us. It feels too pat.To Polanski’s credit, he never descends into pure mawkishness; if this movie is a failure, it is not that kind of failure (imagine what a Randall Wallace, for instance, might have done with this material). But good intentions don't necessarily translate into good movies.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6413&reviewer=223
originally posted: 12/03/02 13:09:59
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
27-Dec-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
06-Mar-2003
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