The Pianist

My wife and I watched The Pianist last night. We'd wanted to see it earlier, but when you're at the video store and trying to decide between the typical Hollywood pap and a bleak portrayal of man's capacity for cruelty, the Hollywood pap has a distinct advantage. This is not an easy movie to watch. It will make you angry and it will make you weep. And for me, it kept me up for much the night, unable to sleep and running the scenes over and over in my mind.

The movie is based on the biography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who was Warsaw's greatest pianist and who managed to survive the Nazi obliteration of the Jewish presence in that city. We are taken through his experiences during the war years in an episodic fashion, never really getting to know him but perhaps feeling his suffering all the more because of this. In fact, you could say that the movie isn't really his story, it's the story of what happened in Warsaw -- he is the witness through who's eyes you see it. The movie is long, but it never really dwells on one period of time. You feel the pace of the crushing vise of the Nazi machine. First there are minor indignities, then economic hardship, then forced relocation, then major indignities, then random violence and forced labour, and finally full systematic genocide. Szpilman escapes this of course, and manages to survive through the intervention of the Polish underground, some lucky breaks and his own determination.

This movie demands you to ask Why? If the leaders of the free world during the 1930s had any backbone, the events in this movie would not have happened. Germany was weak, and was acting in an aggressive manor. Hitler had broken the treaty of Versailles, giving France and England the moral and legal right to end his regime. But instead they appeased him and tried to reason with him, and the results were too horrific to comprehend. Facing down brutal totalitarian regimes is the only sane response to them, a fact which is still poorly understood by many.