One would’ve hoped that after the horrors inflicted on the Jewish people during the Holocaust, the days of profoundly ingrained, widespread prejudice against them were a thing of a bygone era. However, as of 2021, anti-Semitic hate crimes have surged, and certain public figures have refused to condemn it, with some even employing and encouraging anti-Semitic rhetoric. 2022 marks 20 years since the controversial director Roman Polanski arguably made his last true masterpiece.
2002’s The Pianist took home three Academy Awards at the 2003 Oscars, as it brought the horrors experienced by Polish Jews at the Warsaw Ghetto into a vivid, tangible existence for audiences across the world through the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman. This year, The Pianist turned 20 after having premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, so let’s take a retrospective look at the film and what makes it Polanski’s last great film.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Polanski Aside, The Pianist Honors an Artist in WWII
Syrena Entertainment GroupPathé
Polanski was an immensely famous Polish-French director who went into exile over the rape of a minor in the ’70s, so there was a (surprisingly) small uproar when The Pianist won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and brought Polanski the Academy Award for Best Director. However, looking at the film itself without the artist in the director’s chair reveals a truly moving, marvelously acted movie.
Taking place over the longevity of World War II, The Pianist tells the true story of a famous Polish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, and his family’s battle for survival in the Warsaw Ghetto, while faced with the Jew-hating Nazi’s invasion of Poland. Commencing in 1939, the film finds Spzilman sitting behind a piano in a Warsaw recording studio as the sound of falling bombs overhead become louder and louder.
The talented pianist’s mentality certainly embraces the Churchillian rhetoric of “Keep Calm and Carry On” as he continues to play despite the dangers posed by an imminent Nazi offensive. As Hitler’s instruction begins to filter through into the Polish capital, half a million Jews residing in-and-around the city are forced into a 3.4km district. Through a series of devastating events, Szpilman is left to survive alone, following the deportation of his family to a horrific concentration camp.
The Ghetto and the Devastating Reality of the Jewish Persecution
When one thinks of the word “ghetto,” it sparks derogatory connotations of a deprived urban area usually inhabited by a sole minority ethnic group; in the states and popular culture, it tends to denote crime, violence, and general lawlessness. Yet while Wladyslaw Szpilman and his family’s hand was somewhat forced, the Warsaw Ghetto (while comprising similar traits such as extreme poverty) was a grim reality forced upon half a million Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. It was a way of concentrating Warsaw’s Jewish population into a confined space, readying them for an inevitable, and predominantly fateful journey to one of the country’s concentration camps.
The Pianist expertly captures the ensuing carnage and the immense suffering of a people within the walls of this makeshift Jewish megalopolis. In Polanski’s harrowing examination of the perils of the fascist Nazi regime, the sun never shines, the film’s palette is awash with fifty shades of gray, like those imprisoned in the Ghetto, Polanski affords us neither the luxury nor the brief reprieve of color. Not the glimmer of sunshine, or the sky’s pearly blues, just the harshness of bare brick, and dilapidated old buildings. It is permanently cold, gray, and snowy, the bitterness of the freeze can be felt via Szpilman’s enduring hunched posture and eternal shiver.
Szpilman and his Jewish counterparts’ plight becomes progressively bleak during the film’s runtime, with poignant, increasingly shocking imagery littered throughout. Skeletal corpses are strewn across the street as people weave around them, such a common fixture in Ghetto-life, that their undignified demise is met with an air of unreactive indifference rather than a horrified gasp. A disabled man is hurled to his death from a balcony by the callous Gestapo, and herds of innocent people being loaded onto freight trains bound for death camps. It’s a lesson in how easily a tolerance of the hellishly morbid can be built for one who is subjected to the macabre barbarity of evils on an everyday basis. Through the lens of The Pianist, we are given an unadulterated insight into one man’s unwavering will to survive and a historically accurate portrayal of the atrocities that took place behind the barb-wired walls of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Adrien Brody’s Academy Award-Winning Performance
The role of Wladyslaw Szpilman was the first Adrien Brody performance to receive Academy Award recognition, and that subsequently led to him scooping the most prestigious individual prize in the industry. As Szpilman, Brody cuts a continually gaunt figure, bereft of hope and ideas of how to free himself and his family from their desperate situation. His illustration of a man faced with extreme adversity is treated with the true visible anguish, physical suffering, and psychological torment that Szpilman and those incarcerated would have experienced so immensely translates so brilliantly on-screen.
The Pianist isn’t a story of heroism or bravery, but rather a more relatable portrait of a Jewish man who has the most tyrannical of circumstances imposed on him,a man who is simply in an indefinite state of fight-or-flight. He effortlessly demonstrates very real human emotions, and this willingness to forsake his pride, integrity, and dignity to survive. While Polanski would later make the very good film Ghost Writer, it’s clear that The Pianist is his last real masterpiece.
