The Pianist ***** (2001, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay) – Classic Movie Review 308

The Pianist produced the two main shocks at the 2003 Oscars when outsiders Adrien Brody won the Best Actor and Roman Polanski the Best Director awards, with Ronald Harwood the deserved third winner for Best Adapted Screenplay. It marks a most welcome return to form, respectability and credibility for the scandal-tainted Polanski, particularly with his win at the Academy Awards and the film’s acclaim in America.

Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1995) shows that just one person could make a difference and proposes that one good act saves the world. Now Roman Polanski’s The Pianist takes another real-life Holocaust story and shows that, sometimes, it takes many, many people to help one person to survive and a myriad of good acts to save the life of a single man.

This is the extraordinary story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who alone managed to survive the Nazi destruction of his family’s comfortable lifestyle, the building of the Warsaw Ghetto and the carting off of all his relatives to a concentration camp.

Polanski’s long, gruelling and hard-to-watch but noble Holocaust drama is an incredibly moving film, reducing most audiences to tears. Though very distressing at times, it is a hugely enriching and life-affirming experience.

The most moving sequence is left till nearly last: when Szpilman’s survival depends on the kindness of one of his enemy. German Captain Wilm Hosenfeld finds him trying to find food in the city ruins, but, instead of killing him, discovers that he’s a pianist and offers him food and his overcoat. How could this ever have happened? But it did.

Adrien Brody is absolutely compelling in a total tour-de-force as Szpilman, the best thing this fine, distinguished actor has ever done. Thomas Kretschmann is ideal as Hosenfeld, and there is just enough room for Maureen Lipman and Frank Finlay to impress too as Szpilman’s parents.

Polanski’s own mother died in a concentration camp, so this film is an act of forgiveness for him, and he makes a wonderful, painstaking, heartfelt job of it. It is virtually impossible not to be moved to tears by this Cannes Palme D’Or prize-winner and seven Oscar-nominated film.

Frank Finlay, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work in Othello (1965) and starred in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers films of the Seventies, died on 30 January 2016, aged 89.

© Derek Winnert Classic Film Review 308 derekwinnert.com