Roman Polanski’s Holocaust drama is powerful and patient, with Adrien Brody making the effort of staying alive painfully visible. The early family dialogue is stiff, but the film’s restraint makes its violence harder to bear.
Roman Polanski’s The Pianist is a powerful, patient film about surviving Nazi occupation, with an opening stretch that is less assured than what follows. It asks us to stay close to Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish musician in Warsaw, without making his survival a reward for courage or talent. Luck matters, and the violence does not arrive according to any fair or comprehensible rule. At 150 minutes, it gives that uncertainty time to become oppressive, though some of the early dialogue could have been shorter.
Ronald Harwood’s screenplay is most awkward when it is arranging the family and explaining their circumstances. Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman, as Szpilman’s parents, help give those early scenes a recognisable domestic scale, but the exchanges sometimes sound prepared for our benefit. There is affection here, and a useful sense of people trying to continue a conversation while everything around them changes. We wanted to know them better before the script asked them to explain so much. The film earns its seriousness more convincingly once there is less talk.
Adrien Brody gives Szpilman a reserve that can initially look like a shortage of character. He does not keep signalling what we should admire, and his physical performance gradually becomes more telling than anything he says. We were distressed by his increasing frailty: the effort of simply remaining alive becomes visible in his body. There is no need for a speech to tell us what has been taken from him. Brody makes endurance feel laborious, uncertain and exhausting.
Paweł Edelman’s cinematography keeps enough distance for us to register the damage around Szpilman, rather than continually seeking refuge in his face. The Warsaw ghetto remains a place inhabited by other people, whose suffering cannot be contained within the principal character’s story. Allan Starski’s production design gives the city’s progressive destruction a disturbing physical weight; the surroundings demand attention without becoming an attraction in themselves. These are handsome images of terrible things, and Polanski is careful about the danger in that. The camera leaves us time to look beyond Brody.
Hervé de Luze’s editing helps the repeated horrors accumulate without turning each into a separate dramatic climax. That steady pace can be punishing, and there are passages in which the film risks becoming monotonous. Elsewhere, it makes the arbitrary violence harder to dismiss once a scene has finished. Wojciech Kilar’s score supplies an audible sadness that we find less necessary: Brody has already made the fear and loneliness plain. The music matters most through Szpilman himself, because it gives us something particular to understand about the life under threat.
A survival drama often promises the satisfaction of watching somebody master impossible circumstances. Polanski offers little of that reassurance, and the distance he maintains will frustrate anyone who needs ready access to a character’s thoughts. Brody gives us enough to follow through his physical effort and his reluctance to advertise his feelings. The film is demanding because so much depends on waiting, chance and the next arbitrary exercise of power. Choose it for an evening when there is time to sit quietly afterwards.
