Talent and restraint [WARNING, MAY SPOIL PLOT] (The Pianist (DVD))

Member Name: mpafp

Product:	The Pianist (DVD)
Date:	03/08/03 (129 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: see op

Disadvantages: few

A film about the holocaust and Nazis is not one which will make you sit up and think ?What an original idea, I?d better go and see that?, yet The Pianist manages to sustain interest throughout, and to present hitherto undiscovered angles on the question of Jewish life under the Nazi regime.

One of the interesting things about Wladyslaw Szpilman, the main character is that he is more of an observer than a sufferer. Compared to the vast majority of the Jews he seems to get a fantastic deal. ?Fantastic deal?, of course, is a relative term here: he loses his family, job, home, witnesses terrifying brutality, starves and comes very close to death on several occasions. But there were also many occasions during the film -- when Szpilman sat watching the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto revolt from the relative safety of his flat, for example ? when I experienced the feeling I used to get when I bunked off games at my school: that outside people were doing something energetic with which I didn?t wish to be involved, and as long as I was quiet and careful I wouldn?t have to join them. Szpilman is forever escaping out of back doors, surviving arbitrary Nazi culling procedures, and having his life saved by sympathetic friends and strangers who often don?t survive themselves.

If Szpilman ?bunks off? the holocaust, however, it does not make him any less of an empathetic character. The viewer shares his desire above all to survive, rather than sacrifice himself gloriously. Besides, he shows he is no coward with his offer to help the rebels before he leaves the work camp in the ghetto. And this desire to survive is the reason why we have Szpilman?s story at all: the film is based on a real person. If the string of astonishing good luck Szpilman has seems unbelievable to an audience used to Hollywood holocaust stereotypes, it is because Szpilman represents the minute minority: the survivors.

Adrian Brody (Szpilman) has a striking look of quiet, unindulge
nt sadness which suits the part perfectly. He gains sympathy, but is not so miserable-looking that you want to kick him. And Frank Finlay portrays a devastatingly poignant frailty in his role as the father, which makes his death heart-rending.

The Pianist is one of those films which manages to portray incredible tragedy with admirable restraint; it lets the plain facts impress, without resorting to cheap emotional tricks.

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