You can miss one of the most unforgettable moments in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” the true story of a Holocaust survivor living in Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto in the blink of an eye.
A German officer stands before a Jewish man who is lying face down in the street. He is the last in a row of Jews who have been randomly executed in a demonstration before their peers.
The officer aims the gun at the man, who holds his breath, knowing what to expect. Click. The officer realizes that he is out of ammunition.
He slowly fishes into his pocket for an extra clip and slides it into the gun. We see the man on the ground, not daring to look above, in an agonizing moment where he can do nothing but await his own demise.
A second later, the new clip is ready. The man shuts his eyes. Bang!
There are many scenes like this in the film. Every extra in “The Pianist” has a face. Every facet of Jewish suffering is explored. Every demographic is represented. No historical footnote goes unnoticed. As celebrated pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman and his family sit and wait to be loaded into cattle cars with other families, an urchin approaches them, holding a cigar box filled with caramels.
“How much?” asks Wladyslaw’s father, knowing that they no longer have any use for money. The boy asks for the equivalent of twenty dollars.
“Twenty for one caramel? But what will you do with this?” he asks the child. The boy says nothing but eagerly takes the money and runs off. Polanski himself was a Holocaust survivor and the immediacy of death looms over the picture with the perfunctory feel of a daily Nazi ‘To Do’ list. Ultimately though, this is a story about survivors, not victims.
The best thing about the film is actor Adrien Brody, whose delicate and expressive face betrays a generation of suffering. As Szpilman, he endures hunger, boredom, loneliness and moments of sheer desperation as a Jew who spends most of the war in hiding.
The film is long and can be tedious, often punctuated by silent periods of hiding that take place in secret apartments or bombed out buildings. At times it feels like Castaway: The Jewish Experience- Brody appears only minutes away from chatting up inanimate objects.
But Polanski pulls no punches here. There is no gooey condescension to the film, no swirling epi-tragic soundtracks to prompt you to empathize at all the right moments.
You must live through every extended second of pain and loneliness, fear and boredom, and emerge from the film realizing still, that you have experienced only a fractional piece of the puzzle.
Every ingredient necessary for a viewer to come to a better, more truthful understanding of this history is made available to them and is laid out in the simple, honest vocabulary of someone who has lived through the experience.
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