The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

The Pianist

By Peter Tonguette

Peter Tonguette is a staff writer for The Film Journal. His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema and Bright Lights Film Journal. You can visit Peter Tonguette's personal review site here.

Though Roman Polanski is sprightly at 69 when you reflect that Robert Altman will be 78 in 2003, as will Sidney Lumet, and Manoel de Oliveria--perhaps the world's greatest living director--will be 95, The Pianist is a late work if I’ve ever seen one. In terms of what the film is, what light it was undoubtedly conceived in by Polanski, and how it has been received by the mainstream of the critical community, it calls to mind memories of a hundred other last movies by major directors: Welles’s final series of essay films, Bresson’s L’Argent (1983), Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963) or Seven Women (1965), Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut(1999). Given the simple diversity of the films I've just listed, I'll briefly outline what I mean, in this context, by "late work" and how Polanski's film aligns itself with this tradition.

For me, the most important thing in the identification of a late work is that it usually serves, as The Pianist does for Polanski and as all of the above films do for their respective directors, as both a mechanism to catalog and challenge the director's career, clarifying, refining, and sometimes even contradicting their paramount preoccupations, while approaching them,
generally, with more calm and serenity--even plainess--than work from middle age or youth. The director's concerns are laid bare, as though there is no longer any point to masking them in fancy window dressing. This is Hitchcock's achievement in Family Plot (1976), a film which is utterly joyous in the way it allows the audience to participate in the director's trickery; the film may fall flat as suspense, but that is precisely what is so glorious about it.

The Pianist touches on nearly everything that Polanski is--the psychological acuity is here, as is the gallows humor, the precision and control of his mise en scene, and the painful, unaccentuated realism--while locating the origin of many of these trademarks in Polanski's survival and escape from the Krakow ghetto at age seven. The story told is not Polanski's--it is based on the true story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman and the script by Ronald Harwood is taken from Szpilman’s memoir of his survival of the Holocaust--but the director's identification with his protagonist is so intimate that it feels like autobiography. The directness of this work lends it an aura of last words. It's as though Polanski was finally--after years of indirection--honing in on where his art comes from.

The urgency which with the film seems to have been made supports my reading of it as a kind of summary work. Some simple points of fact: before directing The Pianist, Polanski had made only one picture since 1994, 2000's The Ninth Gate, a film he himself views as trivial (though, it must be said, it is "trivial" in a massively entertaining way--The Ninth Gate is a film shot and funded entirely overseas but which outclasses and out-entertains virtually every major studio movie released that year.). Though we've had major Polanski works since his exile in Europe--1979's Tess is a masterpiece, as is 1992's Bitter Moon--the rest of his work from this period--and there's not a lot of it--has been comprised of well realized, though ultimately minor divertissements, such as 1985's Pirates, 1988's Frantic, and The Ninth Gate. This kind of inactivity cannot have been a matter of choice, particularly given the rate of Polanski's output--and, more importantly, the kind of films he made--in the years before his exile. But it's the sort of thing that spurs directors to make "the next one count," and The Pianist, in all of its searing self-revelation, does count, deeply and enduringly so.

How the film has been received by many critics strikes me as further indication of its placement as a sort of anticipative final statement. For as long as there have been late works, there has been critical confoundment--even downright anger--in the appreciation of them. Altman's Gosford Park (2001) was, on the whole, received warmly by the mainstream press but, strangely, viewed in more negative terms by some auteurists and Altman enthusiasts I know. The central complaint, so far as I've been able to glean, is that Altman went "soft" with this film, eschewing the bile that they view as his trademark for something more human and approachable. While I don't want to defend this kind of nonsense--Altman's compassion towards his characters is, as far as I'm concerned, as directorially representative as his generally satiric stance towards their follies--it is accurate to say that there is something of a softening in Gosford Park, and a final optimism, which Altman has been working towards in a lot of recent work, from the wildly underrated Dr. T and the Women (2000)--which, provocatively but tellingly, Altman regards as his best film--to the sublime human comedy of Cookie's Fortune (1999). All of this serves to make Altman's increased interest in portraying humans more warmly and affectionately as a late career development which expands on characteristics which were more submerged in his earlier work. And, as with so many late career developments, it turns off critics who want to know what to expect from a director.

The same phenomenon, I think, is happening with the reception that The Pianist has been receiving by critics, drawing "mixed" responses ever since the film's victory at Cannes last year when it was awarded the Palmes d'Or from a jury headed by David Lynch. As with Family Plot and Gosford Park, I think it must be the candidness of the film's concerns which is turning the critics off. Just as Family Plot's thematic interests were misunderstood by critics as an indication that the Master of Suspense had finally lost his touch, Polanski's emotional bluntness in The Pianist is being mischaracterized as superifical audience uplift and being lazily misread as a gesture towards senility or, worse, Oscar-baiting sentimentality, a betrayal of the supposed misanthropy which critics have come to expect from Polanski.

But there is no such betrayal at work here, just as there isn't in the Altman; instead, we have an expansion and clarification of qualities which can be traced to the earliest of Polanski's films. While I still don't think I'd want to invoke Jean Renoir in discussing the cinema of Roman Polanski, there is nonetheless a strain of--mitigated--humanism present in all of his best work and which surfaces most explicitly in The Pianist. It is mitigated by what some choose to call Polanski's cynicism, but I what I see as instead the often brutal honesty and morbid inclinations of a man whose personal tragedies have informed his work to a greater degree than any movie or director (Polanski may have come to public attention in America during the golden hued heyday of the "movie brat" generation, but no other director's work of that period is as blissfully free from that old chestnut "homage" as Polanski's is; Hitchcock was an early point of reference, but it was one never made explicit in Polanski's cinema.) It is, then, his compassion for the plights of his characters, rather than his optimism that they will escape the brutality of the world or emerge unscathed, which marks his work as, backhandedly, humanistic. His characters are often basically decent people--Rosemary Woodhouse and Jake Gittes spring to mind immediately--but that is no assurance of their ultimate triumph; their goodness can even work against them, for it can equal naiveness in a society founded on principles of exploitation.

The Pianist has the closest thing to a redemptive ending of any Polanski film since Frantic--and it seems to be conceived almost as a response to the bleakness of a Rosemary's Baby (1967) or Chinatown (1974)--but given what his protagonist endures through the course of the film and what Polanski refuses to cringe from, it feels so well deserved as to make it seem practically revolutionary. In a very meaningful sense, this film seems to be about Polanski's own survival and Szpilman's final triumph might as well be Polanski's own--and our own, too, because we've so benefited from what this man has given us in the form of his art.

Notions of art and survival are linked endlessly in this film. The film opens in forceful, aggressive strokes as Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is introduced to us playing the piano for Polish radio. When a bomb blasts through a wall of the radio station seconds later, he remains casually indifferent for an instant--even oblivious. Yet it's Szpilman's devotion this otherworldly thing--his music--which somehow permits his survival through the abyss of the next five years of his life. When asked by a compassionate SS officer (Thomas Kretschmann) late in the film what he plans to do after the war, Szpilman answers--without a note of intended irony--that he will play the piano on Polish radio. In scenes such as these, we begin to understand the need for art as a form of resistance against the brutality of life and, in doing so, we begin to realize this struggle is Polanski's own.

While A.O. Scott correctly observes in The New York Times that The Pianist benefits from its focus on Szpilman's story and Polanski and screenwriter Ronald Harwood's refusal to "sum up" in a single film an event of the magnitude of the Holocaust, this film nonetheless may be the finest narrative film ever made "about" the Holocaust. The film's first section--of Szpilman and his family's bourgeoisie life gradually and with increasing speed being chipped away at--is largely observational and episodic, marked with images which are shocking, terrifying and which seem practically indelible: a man devouring spilled soup from the street; two SS officers ordering Szpilman's father (Frank Finlay) to walk in the gutter instead of the sidewalk; people being shot at randomly, for target practice or for no reason at all. The unimaginable horror of this event is made palpable through the specificity of these images.

Due to new laws being enacted by the Nazis, the Szpilmans are forced to move from their luxurious home to a small apartment in the Warsaw ghetto. Finally, they are seen hoarded up in a barb-wired yard awaiting a train ride to the concentration camps. Polanski observes how the natural human tendency to see the best in a situation (on entering their new apartment in the ghetto, the father remarks to his family, "It isn't as bad as I expected") is depleted and depleted and depleted until there is no way to deny the obvious any longer. Even the superficial "normalcy" of the ghetto--where Wladyslaw could perform in a local Jewish bar and where the family seems to adjust for brief spurts only to be interrupted by outbursts of savagery and violence--is taken from them eventually and the reality of what is occurring--mass extermination--sets in. By the time the Szpilmans are about to board the train, their meals have been reduced to splitting a single piece of caramel five ways. Polanski shoots this scene simply, directly, unemphatically.

Later, the film becomes reflexive of the association of spatial confinement with madness which has been the subject of a number of Polanski films, from Repulsion (1965) to The Tenant (1976) to Bitter Moon. On the run, Wladyslaw is forced to find refuge in the homes of sympathetic Poles, who set him up in apartments where he lives alone in silence for fear of being discovered, unable to go outside and waiting for weeks, at times, for the delivery of his next meal. The film's delineation of sensory deprivation extends beyond the physical confinement of Szpilman into the mental and emotional realms; at one point, Wladyslaw is harbored in an apartment with a piano. Knowing that pressing a single key would risk giving him away, he--in a tour de force scene--moves his fingers above the keys, never touching them, denied the freedom to practice his art, which somehow has remained vigorous within him.

It's at this stage that Polanski's film takes on an almost surrealistic edge which carries the rest of the film through, but it's softened by the knowledge that these events--or ones close to them--really occurred. After the war, Szpilman is discovered by the Russians wearing an SS coat for warmth and is nearly shot when he is mistaken for a German; it's the sort of macabre bluntness which Polanski excels at and which illustrates the "absurdity of war"--natch, the farce of war--better than the last fifty "antiwar" films to come out of Hollywood.

The film's refusal to divvy up its participants into useless categories of "good" and "bad" is central to its ethical life.. As Kent Jones has noted, Polanski resists the temptation to tack on "humanizing" characteristics to the Jewish characters, "humanizing" in this context meaning denying the Jewish characters anything resembling comprehensive or problematic personalities--as though we needed every Jewish person to be a saint in order to know that the Holocaust stands as one of the most horrific and shameful chapters in human history. Such gestures do little but bastardize and corrupt the events portrayed and they reveal a stifling, though largely unquestioned moral bankruptcy (does making the victims of a terrible event flawed reduce the terribleness of that event?) Just as importantly, Polanski's insistence on seeing shards of decency in the Nazis--most significantly, in the SS officer who housed Szpilman in an attic and fed him during the final weeks of the war--is a slap in the face to the needless movie simplifications which deny the human face of monstrosity in favor of cartoon villains. I suppose such simplifications are currently in vogue once again, with "You're either with us or against us" rhetoric polluting the airwaves and infesting the national consciousness, but they do little but flatter the followers of this sort of thinking. Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone was another Holocaust film from 2002 which managed this subtlety of observation, presenting a world where both Jewish people and SS officers exist as moral greys. Taken together, these two films signal that our best filmmakers are far more sophisticated than the people running the country, if it wasn't already obvious already.

Polanski largely denies Szpilman the conventional attributes of movie heroism. As the film opens, Brody plays him as self-involved, a little dandy-ish, more than a little smug--hardly a bad guy, but far from a saint. Through the course of the film, he does not become an extraordinary figure who saves lives or performs great acts of bravery. He is only as heroic as the physical toll of four years evading the Nazis and living virtually as an animal permits him to be. Yet, in his humanness, the character of Szpilman emerges as perhaps something more honorable: like Polanski himself, who constructs this film as an echo chamber for his own memories and life experiences, he managed to survive one of the closest equivalents to hell that the 20th--or any--century witnessed and paradoxically devoted the rest of his life to the creation and proliferation of what can only be called beauty.