 The Pianist (2002) So too with Polanski's return to glory, The Pianist. Hollywood was so eager to embrace the filmmaker and his film, especially since Polanski himself survived the Holocaust, that they failed to ask themselves whether the movie was truly worth all the accolades. As you can tell, this reviewer found it somewhat lacking. The Pianist tells of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), who at the start of the war makes his living playing this piano on Warsaw radio. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when the Nazis successfully invade Poland. Szpilman, previously convinced that Poland would never fall, finds himself struggling for survival under a totally insane, impossibly brutal regime. Szpilman, through a combination of blind luck and willful survival instinct, endures trial after trial, as everything he once knew is stripped from him, right down to his very identity. The problem is not the story itself, which is based on the real-life Szpilman and can't really be debated, or in Polanski's direction, which is excellent, and a thousand miles away from his previous film, the painfully amateurish The Ninth Gate. Polanski brilliantly evokes the callous cruelty of the Nazis and the randomness of war, in a detached style that gets increasingly claustrophobic as Szpilman's world shrinks to a pinpoint. What's wrong with The Pianist is the character of the pianist. He's a total shell from soup to nuts, unexplained and sadly uninteresting. For a movie that's about a guy who plays the piano, we never get a decent show of how and why he loves the piano, or how this love sustains him through the war. There's no relationship between him and his art, and no change in this relationship as a result of his experiences. Maybe that was intentional, perhaps that didn't really happen, call me a traditionalist, but not having some character development is simply boring. He could have started the movie selfish and ended it selfless, or gone materialist to humanist, or even had a stylistic change from coldly precise to reckless and warm. Anything would have been better than nothing, but nothing's all we get. As a result, Brody's Oscar-winning performance comes across as lacking and generic in a great-actor sort of way. Don't get me wrong, he's a brilliant actor, but no one will ever convince me that he was more deserving of the Best Actor Oscar than Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, much less L'il Bow Wow in Like Mike. But it's really more a reflection on Polanski than anyone else. For someone so critically beloved, Polanski hasn't made a truly memorable film since Chinatown, nor has he committed a truly remarkable rape since the early 70s. So why is he still held up as a brilliant director and master rapist? You'd think with a subject matter so personal he'd put all his experience into the pot and really unleash himself on the Holocaust to make a film that leaves the audience emotionally exhausted. Unfortunately, this is one of the least emotional Holocaust films I can recall seeing. That might even have worked in Polanski's favor (all the best scenes in Schindler's List are the most documentary-like), but it's largely wasted potential. The Pianist is ultimately a very good film that fails to live up to expectation or hype. Hopefully Polanski will get things back on track with a truly incredible film and/or another brilliantly executed underage rape.
Review by Crimedog |