Survivor
Roman Polanski's The Pianist is surprising in more ways than one. You wouldn't think Polanski capable of filmmaking on this level anymore-- the kind of seemingly simple yet elegant visual storytelling that characterized major works like Rosemary's Baby or Chinatown (and was frustratingly evident in snatches of Frantic and The Ninth Gate). You wouldn't think Polanski capable of epic filmmaking of this scale either: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the stretches of ruined city afterwards-- it's uncharacteristic of his work, the best of which stay at eye level and on intimate terms with their characters; they have an inwardness to them, a tendency to turn into solitary quests where the protagonist struggles against an inexplicable world bent on their destruction.
And you wouldn't think Polanski would ever make a Holocaust movie. Oh, his name might pop into mind-- after all, he was a ghetto survivor-- but he's such a wide-ranging director dipping into genres (horror espionage noir fantasy) from immediate present to distant past that you likely gave up hoping. And this in turn was also fascinating this seeming coyness, this contagion of alienation and paranoia in every film he's made save the one he was born to make.
Which gives us the sense of a filmmaker come full circle: Polanski has finally taken up the Nazi persecution of Jews and turned it into another Polanski film.
One of the characters says the word "absurd" more than once, with round shocked eyes, and the word I think is key to understanding the picture. The Pianist is basically a comedy (a successful one unlike say Life is Beautiful where the comedy is fairly funny but the horror has been emasculated), the only proper reaction a perpetually dropped jaw poised between dismay and laughter, possibly both; it's a horrifying hilarious film.
You see it from the start--when Szpilman playing in a radio station is interrupted by a loud explosion (it's the bombing of Warsaw) and insists on continuing; he waves his radio technician away (who adjusts a few knobs to maintain the broadcast before evacuating). Szpilman at this point is something of a dandy: handsome, confident, airily casual about the admiration heaped upon him by a beautiful admirer (you can tell he's wondering how to get in her undies). When he comes home to his bickering family and is informed they may leave Warsaw his reaction is surprise-- what, leave all this? The most famous pianist in the city-- maybe all of Poland?
The absurdities keep piling on. They are required to wear armbands, the instructions for which are characteristically German in their fanatic level of precision and detail; Szpilman's father is viciously slapped and ordered to walk, not on the sidewalk but in the gutter (a detail Polanski borrowed from his father's experience); there is a limit to the money they can possess and an intense argument breaks out as to the best place to hide the surplus (Szpilman's brother has the funniest suggestion, taking his cue from Poe's "The Purloined Letter").
Walls rise around one section of Warsaw with all Jews forced to move inside. Polanski uses life in the ghetto to present one surreal image after another-- Jews approach the boundary wall at night to catch bundles tossed from the other side; kids crawl out of holes at the base (only kids are small enough to fit) carrying contraband (a child halfway through one hole shrieks while his lower half stuck in the other side is being hammered); Jews wait to cross a gentile street while bored soldiers urge them to dance. Szpilman's family watches as Nazis enter a nearby, apartment unceremoniously pick up an old man in his wheelchair, and approach a window. The punchline (shades of Polanski's The Tenant) is appropriately bizarre.
When the ghetto is evacuated Szpilman is rescued from his family's fate, for no better reason than that he once appealed to a ghetto police officer's vanity; he ends up wandering through a gradually deteriorating Warsaw. Critics complained of the slowness of this latter portion but this I thought was Polanski at his most painfully funny-- Szpilman is reduced to the level of a rat, his characteristic pose either curled up in hiding or hunched low with bent knees as he scrambles out a door or window. It becomes a running gag, the number of doors and windows he climbs through; at one point he carefully pushes aside furniture to allow running space for a flying leap. Then there are all the pianos constantly tinkling around him, tempting him, reminding him of what he's lost--at one point he's locked for months inside an apartment with one, with strict instructions not to make a sound. Which makes it inevitable that somewhere along the way Szpilman will be invited to sit down and play: he just sits there rubbing his knuckles, probably wondering at the sheer enormity of his luck. Polanski piles on the deadpan jokes; unlike in some of his films (The Tenant comes to mind), nothing is too weird to violate one's sense of disbelief; the basic subject matter itself is a gaping black hole, a heart of darkness that can absorb anything grotesque.
Polanski is aided by actor Adrien Brody as Szpilman, who's charismatic in the first part, furtive in the second (Brody in a strange way begins to resemble Polanski himself). That second part is particularly difficult to pull off: Brody grows smaller and smaller physically as he huddles in one hole after another, yet the meaning of his actions expand, the joke growing funnier all the time. Polanski here defines what a survivor is or isn't: it's less about dreaming big then about minutiae; less about nobility than persistence; less about dying with dignity than about living with humiliation, even resorting to proclaiming your celebrity status (ironically, Szpilman's reputation is later exploited to his disadvantage); less about deserving than about blind luck. Szpilman (I'm probably not spoiling anything here) survives, but when he looks back and sees the devastation about him, what kind of survival has he won? Who has he helped along the way? Not his family, despite all his efforts to secure work permits; not the lifeless boy he pulled out from under the wall; not the German officer who saved him-- that man would enjoy the pleasures of Soviet prisoner-of-war camps for another seven years (his story would make a good sequel). If there is any final judgment to be rendered on Szpilman's life and worth as a person, Polanski's camera is (blessedly damnably) silent; he knows enough not to give away a good punchline.
By this time Polanski's camera has left its privileged position close to Szpilman's face and looks from a distance as the man assumes his former position as most famous pianist in Warsaw. Szpilman's life (like Polanski's come to think of it) has also come a full circle: he's endured all that struggle and suffering to return to where he was, nothing more. An end title notes that he died at an old age; if he's suffered any more, either from guilt or from some consequence of his survival, if there are any more jokes to be made at Szpilman's-- and (by way of close identification) Polanski's, and (again by way of visual identification) our-- expense, Polanski's camera is no longer there to record it.
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