The Pianist. Directed by Roman Polanski. Written by Ronald Harwood from the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman. With Adrien Brody, Frank Finlay, Ed Stoppard, Maureen Lipman, Emilia Fox, Daniel Caltagirone, Thomas Kretschmann, Julia Rayner, Jessica Kate Meyer, and Ruth Platt. A Focus Features release. At the Avon.

In an oft-quoted remark, the philosopher Theodor Adorno claimed that after Auschwitz, all poetry is barbaric. What about music or movies? In a scene in Schindler's List, one of the greatest Holocaust movies, a Nazi officer plays a piano seemingly unaware of the butchery his men commit around him. So much for Beethoven, and Spielberg as well, who goes soft in the final act of the film, allowing sentimentality to undermine its clarity, truth, and beauty.

Not so Roman Polanski. His adaptation of The Pianist, the memoir of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish concert pianist who survived the Holocaust by hiding out in the Warsaw ghetto, reasserts the validity of music, movies, and poetry as well in the face of history's greatest nightmare.

Played by Adrien Brody in a masterfully restrained and ultimately devastating performance, Szpilman is first seen performing Chopin's Nocturne in C# minor for Warsaw radio. His face has the aquiline beauty of Kafka, his tie and suit are elegant, his hauteur impeccable, and he barely misses a note even when the bombs start falling as the Nazi onslaught on the city begins.

The opening recalls Ernst Lubitsch's sweetly savage comedy To Be or Not to Be (1942), in which the show must go on despite an air raid and does so, managing in the end to undermine the horrendous reality that disrupts it. But Szpilman's art was not quite the equal of the Nazis' evil, and neither was his and his family's imagination capable of grasping the extent of the horror to come.

At first it seems easy irony when a shot of Szpilman's family drinking a toast to better days after hearing on the BBC that Britain has declared war on Germany is followed by a cut to Nazi stormtroopers marching through the streets. Szpilman's father, played with touching grace by Frank Finlay (who played the title role in the TV movie The Death of Adolf Hitler), especially embodies this spirit of stunned incredulity and deluded hope. Whenever dad says "things could be worse," they invariably are, with the next cut to more draconian restrictions, ghettoization, deportations, and doom. This slow encroachment of the Final Solution has been done before on screen, but never with such suffocating authenticity. The terror feels palpable, and the victims cling to the virtues of civilization, decency, and hope with desperate faith.

In Szpilman's case, they cling to the ideal of art, or at least its trappings. The family Bechstein piano has long since been pawned to buy bread, but the pianist still maintains his wardrobe and his air of urbane aloofness as he steps over corpses to play for the "parasites" -- Jews who have made money exploiting the hardships of their fellows -- in the Ghetto café. Indeed, Szpilman's faith in his Muse might be warranted -- he escapes a final round-up of Jews by hiding under the café stage, and his pre-war reputation and circle of artistic friends help gain him refuge in a series of safe houses. He survives two uprisings and numerous close calls -- if this were not a true story, or a Polanski movie, no one would believe the coincidences. When Szpilman finally can play Chopin on a piano again, he not only saves his life, he vindicates it.

Or does he? Szpilman chooses survival when he had a chance to join others who died fighting, "with dignity," as one character puts it, "not as a stain on history," as another insists. Like many artists, however, Szpilman maintains an Olympian detachment. So does Polanski, who himself escaped the Nazis as a Jewish child in Kraków, and whose wartime experiences no doubt color every frame of his work. Why, then, some have complained, is he so absent in this most autobiographical of his films, allowing his images of the Holocaust to take on an almost generic cast?

Aside from the obvious objection that The Pianist is another person's story, Polanski's seemingly cold objectivity is illusory. Details emerge with the shocking, absurd vividness that can come only from traumatic experience: a dead woman frozen in a pose that looks balletic, an invalid in a wheelchair tossed from a window. Motifs recur that have shaped Polanski's body of work, in particular the image of the hapless observer trapped in an apartment observing the horror from a window, waiting for it to seek him or her out, that make Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, and The Tenant so creepy, claustrophobic, and irresistible. As Polanski depicts it, Szpilman's ordeal was a rear window on the greatest crime of all, one that neither artists nor voyeurs can fully escape.

The hunger artist

Adrien Brody suffers for his art.

For The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick's adaptation of James Jones's novel about the battle of Guadalcanal, Brody survived months of tropical squalor in a simulated boot camp that included roaches, venomous spiders the size of dinner plates, and hostile Australian extras. After all that, most of his performance ended up on the cutting-room floor.

As a mohawked musician in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, he played before a real audience of punkers who showed their appreciation by spitting at him.

For Harrison's Flowers, Elie Chouraqui's tale of genocide in the Balkans, he nearly had an eardrum blown out by an explosion. All this was just a warm-up for The Pianist, Roman Polanski's astounding adaptation of the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish concert pianist who survived the Holocaust in the Warsaw Ghetto. As Szpilman, Brody had two tasks to accomplish before filming began: learn how to play Chopin, and starve himself.

"I lost 30 pounds," he recalls. "I actually had to lose the weight and then gain it back, because of the chronology, shooting the end first. So at rehearsal I was really fit, strong, and I had to lose it all, all the muscle, and then work my way back out of that."

Masochistic though that regimen might seem, Brody felt it was essential.

"I think it's the only way that I felt would have been appropriate to portray a man in that condition, who is actually a historical figure, and dealing with something as serious as this. And then I felt the responsibility to be as honest as I possibly could with my interpretation. And I felt a responsibility to Roman as well because of his experiences, in Kraków [Polanski was himself a survivor of the Holocaust], and I knew how personal this was for him, so I was incredibly honored to have the role, and it meant a great deal to me."

The weight loss and the Chopin were only the beginning of Brody's ordeal.

"It took a degree of discipline that I never had to have before. We had six weeks without another actor on the set. He [Polanski] didn't like using a stand-in, so I had to block every scene, all day, six days a week -- long days. I could never let go of this character, for a minute. I'd come home and I'd be exhausted, I couldn't talk anymore; I was wiped out. I'd spend the day isolating myself. I'd wear earplugs. He [Polanski] would communicate to the crew in Polish, would only talk to me when I needed direction. And I spent the day practicing my keyboard in the trailer, working on the set with the same set of mind, coming home, sleep for a few hours, and come in the next day, do the same."

To imagine the depths of Szpilman's nightmare, Brody delved into the historical record and into his own personal experience.

"What I had to focus on was a lot of literature that they made available, that I would absorb parts of . . . there was some great documentary footage. But I also had to find a personal connection to that feeling of loss and isolation and deprivation. Not just understanding the time and the specifics of another character, another story. So I isolated myself.

"I've experienced loss, I've experienced pain, but nothing on that level, and even that wasn't . . . there's no comparison, unfortunately. I can't just conjure up those feelings. But I had to stay immersed in that place. Not just have something to reflect on, and recall, but to experience, to the core. And that's the only way I felt I could do it justice. And really, it's insignificant, my hunger and all that. It's insignificant compared to the hunger that people are really experiencing, because technically, it was optional. If I did become ill, I would have eaten. If something did happen to me, I had an option. It's not the same feeling as not knowing if there's another morsel around the corner, and having nothing, and all those things really happening."

Insignificant or not, Brody's suffering for the role has paid off. He won the Best Actor award from the Boston Society of Film Critics, which also chose Polanski as Best Director and The Pianist as Best Film. The Golden Globes nominated Brody for Best Actor and the film for Best Picture.

Oscars beckon. Meanwhile, Brody has taken a role that offers an escape from the brutal realities of The Pianist. He plays a hallucination in Keith Gordon's adaptation of Dennis Potter's beloved TV series The Singing Detective.

"Being a hallucination, there is no reality ever," he says. "If you're just a figure of someone's imagination, and your character doesn't even know where he is or why he's there, there are no limits."
-- P.K.

Issue Date: January 10 - 16, 2003