THE PIANIST (2002). Steven Spielberg may go soft in the final act of Schindler's List, but not Roman Polanski in this adaptation of the memoir of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish concert pianist who survived the Holocaust by hiding out in the Warsaw ghetto. We first see Szpilman (a masterful Adrien Brody) playing Chopin for Warsaw radio as the bombs start falling. His father, played with touching grace by Frank Finlay, reminds us that "things could be worse," and 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. Szpilman escapes a final round-up of Jews by hiding under a café stage, and his pre-war reputation and circle of artistic friends help gain him refuge in a series of safe houses. Polanski declines to criticize a man who chose survival when he had a chance to join others who died fighting -- yet this is a director who himself escaped the Nazis as a Jewish child in Kraków, and his wartime experiences color every frame of his work. Details emerge with the shocking 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. (148m)

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