Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) works as a pianist in Warsaw. After Germany invades Poland and occupies, Szpilman and his family struggle to adjust to anti-Jewish laws. German rule grows increasingly repressive: Warsaw becomes a closed-off ghetto, the Nazi occupiers committing random atrocities. Eventually Szpilman's family is shipped to Treblinka, leaving Szpilman alone. He struggles to survive in Warsaw, brushing shoulders with underground resistors, unfriendly Poles and Germans both brutal and humane.
It's hard to review The Pianist without invoking Schindler's List (1993). Groggy loves Schindler but acknowledges that Steven Spielberg's epic plays its subject remarkably safe. For one, the Jews remain mostly faceless victims, awaiting either death or rescue at Gentiles' hands. And in Ralph Fiennes' monstrous Amon Goeth, Spielberg provides a convenient hate figure: the Final Solution seems less national madness than the actions of a psychopath.
In contrast, The Pianist's atrocities feel organic, product of a cultural mindset. Conditioned to view Jews as subhuman, most Germans don't blink at casual murder. Polanski depicts creeping repression mingled with pointless cruelty, like the fate doled out to a handicapped man. Yet even in this moral vortex, good Germans do exist: we admire Captain Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who shelters Szpilman at great personal risk. Unmentioned by the film, Szpilman spent years fruitlessly trying to save Hosenfeld from Soviet internment.
The Pianist benefits from its limited perspective: Polanski and writer Ronald Harwood don't show every atrocity, preferring a tragic portrait of human complacency. Szpilman's introduction, playing piano as Nazi bombs rock his studio, sets the tone. Warsaw's Jews accommodate Nazi indignities, from wearing Stars of David to ghettoization with minor complaints. They're gradually stripped of humanity yet few resist, many actively collaborate. Polanski doesn't ascribe this to Jewish fatalism - rather helpless, desperate optimism. Even as they're rounded up for deportation, Warsaw's Jews assure themselves things will get better.
For all that, The Pianist possesses the sweep of an old-fashioned epic. Polanski provides faultless period recreations and set pieces, bolstered by Pawel Edelman's handsome photography. Showcase moments like the Ghetto uprising and the deportation scenes are restrained but powerful; impeccable art direction and ace computer effects sell the rest. Yet like the best epics, Pianist is less impressive as spectacle than character study.
Polanski and Harwood make Szpilman arrogant and self-absorbed early on, more interested in chasing skirt than resisting Nazism. Well-connected and prosperous, he fares better than most: friendships with policeman Heller (Roy Smiles) and cellist Dorota (Emilia Fox) help him avoid the death camps. But Szpilman remains a passive observer to the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the larger 1944 revolt, surviving forced labor and imprisonment through will and luck. He's not a hero, merely a survivor, reduced by circumstance to an animal existence.
Adrien Brody underwent a punishing Method routine for his role. It must have worked, as Brody delivers a towering performance. He makes Wladyslaw flawed yet consistently human, showing not only through haggard appearance but anguished mannerisms and endlessly expressive face. Without slighting a fine supporting cast (including Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay and Emilia Fox), the film belongs to Brody.
The Pianist is a challenging film: an unblinking view of Nazi atrocity, a character study of a man less heroic than pitiable. For all that it's a dramatic tour de force, delivering a kick few historical dramas achieve.