NCMojo

My wife and I watched The Pianist by Roman Polanski last night. We sat down to watch it with great anticipation. Not only did it win several Academy Awards, along with the Golden Palm at Cannes, but, most significantly, it got two big "thumbs up" from Tracey Morgan and Bernie Mac. So we put the kids to bed, fired up the DVD player, and popped in the disk.

Great opening. Always good to open up a movie with a bang. And we were quickly introduced to the Szpilman family -- and then things bogged down.

For one thing, there were a lot of characters thrown out for a few minutes of screen time who just disappeared -- some taken away by the Nazis, of course, but others who just fell out of the plot, only to reappear for three minutes halfway through the film. I know this is art imitating life, but as a viewer I kept expecting to make an emotional attachment to anyone other than Adrian Brody, but as soon as they started showing you something about that supporting character, the plot whisked them away.

Ah yes, the plot. What exactly is the point of this picture, anyway? Szpilman never really does anything in this film. He gives some half-hearted attempts from time to time, but for the most part all he does is whimper and hide. Everyone else does everything else for him -- just because he was this great artist, everyone else takes on the danger and the pain, and practically gives him his life.

And it's not like that is the core message of the movie -- that everyone else is willing to sacrifice their lives to sustain the life of one great artist. No, that is not the message that Polanski wanted to portray. Polanski wanted you to see Szpilman as a great and noble hero, even though the back story (as expressed by the film) does little to exhibit this.

Nor does the film plumb the depth of horror that was the Holocaust. Or show you much of the courage of the Warsaw Ghetto resisters. Or even do a very good job of showing you impact of World War Two. Szpilman ends up viewing the vast majority of these things from his apartment window, and so we, too, experience this same disconnection.

Is this a movie about how a man will do whatever it takes to survive, even if it means abandoing all principles and ideals and playing the role of the traitor or the coward? No. Szpilman is portrayed as being courageous, resourceful, a true survivor. My objection to this portrayal: there were many, many people who survived through worse. People ate rats and leather shoes. People hid in sewer tunnels and mutilated their own bodies in order to survive. Szpilman had to be cooped up in a one bedroom apartment for a good part of the war -- and he was only brought food and drink a few times a week. There were very few occasions where we saw him truly suffering, and then it was only a momentary lapse until a new benefactor came along.

Does Adrian Brody do a fine job? Yes. Is the movie wonderfully filmed? Yes. Might there have been a good film hidden somewhere within the extraordinarily fortuitous survival of Wladyslaw Szpilman? Perhaps, but that is not what Roman Polanski wanted to show us. He wanted to make his hero into a noble, dignified figure, and in so doing he destroyed whatever emotional significance this film could have had.

sundog

I think you're wrong in Polanski's intentions for the Szpilman character. That's the strength of the picture. It has an ambiguous central character that does very little to alter the events in the movie.

He is simply a survivor, and I think Polanski, as a survivor himself, connected with that aspect: self-preservation. And by focusing so tightly on Szpilman and the people who fade in and out Polanski creates a feeling of guilt in the audience. Szpilman is helpless, he's not a hero. People protect him for their own reasons, some because they appreciate his art in the chaos of war.

But this shows you understand the ambivalence of the "hero." In a previous discussion Pants wrote about the scene with the boy stuck under the wall and how that illustrated the conflict, that survival is very personal and sometimes selfish.

folgersnyourcup

I wholeheartedly disagree with every aspect of your post NCMojo. I loved the movie.

I'm from NC as well! I go to UNC Charlotte and live in Raleigh during the summer.

NCMojo

That is cool and excellent!

Rule of thumb here at DVDTalk: you can't just say "I disagree with every aspect"... you've got to give a little more detail than that, so we have grounds to continue the discussion.

Or you have to say something witty and clever and throw a smilie at the end of it.

folgersnyourcup

I mean to discuss my opinions later, I'm at work right now though and have absolutely zero time to write out a detailed response. Sorry.

But I did mean to have a smilie in my previous post. That post ended up not being what was originally intended by its' writer. A modified aspect ratio so to speak though modified by a lack of effort/sloppiness by the post's writer, not by an evil studio. :'

That little mark after the word studio is supposed to be a winking smily though I have forgotten how to make one at the moment.

"Sucked" is such a strong word......

Mourn

I don't think The Pianist sucked, altough I do agree with a lot of what you said. The movie seemed to be about a regular, unremarkable person (other than his piano skills) stuck in the middle of a terrible conflict. Szpilman does nothing heroic and in fact behaves in a rather cowardly manner for a lot of the film.

There is nothing wrong with that however; that is how most people would behave in the same circumstances.

The Pianist is one of those movies i think of as being about an average person and while I don't particularly care for those kind of movies, that doesn't make them bad. It's just a question of taste.

That being said, I did have some problems with some of the editing and the movie was a bit mellodramatic and cliched in parts.

NCMojo

I think the problem is that Polanski wants to champion Szpilman as a "survivor", but in doing so he defeats his own purpose. If this is a study in weakness, ambivalence and selfishness in the name of survival (a worthy theme) then we should see the character presented in a weak and selfish manner. Instead, Polanski aims at making Szpilman into a true hero, and tries to make his actions seem more heroic than they are. I would have appreciated a film that would have challenged me with a character doing despicable actions just to get by, but that is not what I saw in The Pianist. Szpilman is portrayed as being a noble and caring person, even when his actions show him to be more ignoble and callous.

Well, I really, really did not enjoy this film. I thought that Polanski's portrayal of Szpilman was a complete and utter cop-out. The excellent cinematography and Brody's fairly decent acting notwithstanding, I do not think that saying that the movie "sucked" is too strong a word. But that is just my opinion.

NCMojo

So you agree with most of what I said, plus you added in two more negative comments -- doesn't this mean that you, too, think the movie sucked?

Phyre

I think, again, you are projecting your views onto Polanski's. And also you seem to have the desire to see things in black or white, hero or weakness. Why can't Szpilman simply be an average person toiling through terrible times? Most films are either about the very weak or the very strong, I commend Polanski for not only picking a fairly modest person as his protagonist, but also putting him in the context of a timeperiod that is rife, especially in film, with either Heroes or Villains.

sundog

It never struck me that Polanski was championing Szpilman. Brody's acting and Polanski's mise-en-scene is passive, as a witness, not portraying Szpilman in a laudatory fashion.

And it's true that Szpilman carries himself in a noble manner (as many artists do). But then that facade is deconstructed throughout the movie as Szpilman physically changes. And that's another depiction of war's dehumanization.

What kind of despicable actions do you want from him? Toward other Poles, or Nazis, or himself? What would that accomplish? Have you seen The Grey Zone? I heard it was pretty good, kind of came and went. I didn't get to see it, but it's about the Jews in concentration camps that helped the Nazis in cremating bodies in order to live a little longer. That sounds like something you'd appreciate more, but it also sounds like it's going down a completely different avenue than Polanski.

What I liked mainly about The Pianist was the way Szpilman also seemed charmed, protected by unseen forces. Not god, but the filmmaker himself, Polanski. It's his empathy, communicated through the film, that really struck me. But I don't think the director was filming Szpilman as a hero. Polanski's just another witness.

Numanoid

Agreed. ncmojo, it seems that YOU are the one that wants Szpilman to be a hero, not Polanski. WWII movies with a "hero" are a dime a dozen. The thing about this film which makes it more thought-provoking is that there is no hero. The closest thing to a hero in the film is the German officer in the end who gives Szpilman his coat. Also, this is a true story. So making a hero out of someone who simply survived would have been too predictable and "Hollywood" to me.

NCMojo

I have no problem with showing a film about Joe Average... heck, I'd even be OK with a character-driven story about a barber that lived and worked in a village two miles from a Polish concentration camp, with the Holocaust and WWII being a backdrop for everything else.

But in The Pianist, we are not allowed to truly see Szpilman as anything other than a noble figure. Everyone else reveres and protects him; they repeatedly show him suffering the indignities and punisments subjected to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland; horrible and awful things happen all around him, and he does not respond in any way. Even when he does respond (he pulls a boy being beaten away from his attacker, only to have the boy die in his arms), we only hover over this scene from a distance -- the incidence makes no impact whatsoever that we can see on Szpilman, and without his reaction, his emotion, we are left feeling empty and shallow.

Contrast the emotions of this film with the emotions of Schindler's List. Same kind of "average man" story here, but Spielberg digs deep to show us the humanity, the frailty of character, the randomness and the despair. That is what storytelling is supposed to be about; why would anyone want to watch a two and a half hour movie about nothing in particular happening to someone who is no one in particular?

sundog

I was trying not to bring up Schindler's List because I think the two films are as different as you can get when it comes to Holocaust drama. That and it's been very long since I've seen Spielberg's film. While I don't want to call it overrated because Spielberg, when emotionally attached to a project, is a magnificient director, I didn't care for the emotional bludgeoning. I prefer Polanski's approach much more.

Patman

This is a tale of protecting art in the midst of war, even at the cost of human life.

NCMojo

I could not disagree with you more. Sure, everyone jumped in and tried to save Szpilman's life because he was a great artist... and that could have been a great theme for the movie... but Polanski did not make that the theme of this movie. Very few characters really focus on how tremendously gifted Szpilman was as an artist -- most people call him a musician, or just a piano player. The Polish woman that he meets (Halina?) admires him as a great artist, and the German officer at the end comes to recognize how great he was... but no one else pays it much mind, except to dismiss him as a "musician" and not a true worker.

(By the way... what was the deal with the German officer? He appears at the very end of the movie and extends Szpilman's life by an extra two weeks. Polanski spends all of perhaps 10 minutes on this exchange, which clearly could have been the heart of the film. Then at the very end, he suddenly becomes a central character important enough to warrant his own epilogue. What gives?)

audrey

The Pianist sucks….DVDTalk hyperbole aside, it’s easy enough to see how The Pianist fails to resonate with certain people—tastes, expectations, and personal bias vary widely across individuals. But I am at a loss to understand how anyone, even someone who did not enjoy the movie, could say this movie sucks.

I recognize that there is often a difference between what I enjoy or what I connect with and the artistic merit of a movie, book, or other work of art. I don’t care for Wuthering Heights, but I can understand why it is considered an essential read. No work of art touches or connects with everyone---it’s less a reflection of the work, itself, than a testament to the variability of human nature and culture and experience.

Most of your negative comments focus on the story and Szpilman’s lack of action, his reliance on the kindness of other’s to persevere. That’s the point….Szpilman isn’t portrayed as a “hero” in the classic sense, nor is he intended to be; he’s simply a survivor. The Pianist is largely a tale of chance. Like many holocaust survivors Szpilman survives by luck, rather than heroic actions. The movie demonstrates clearly the tenuous lifeline Szpilman clung to and how, but for the grace of Fortune, he might have died.

Part of the beauty of the movie is that as a viewer, you want Szpilman to act, to take charge; yet he never does. Polanski uses this tension to paint a portrait of helplessness; like Szpilman, the viewer is trapped. It’s an uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling. Even the ending, which should bring release, leaves a residue of guilt, a guilt not unlike that experienced by many survivors.

My take is that you fault the movie not for what it is, but for what you want it to be.

Tarantino

haha, that's exactly what I was thinking after seeing this movie. I thought it was a good movie, but what a weak main character.

ncmojo, I agree with you completely.

PalmerJoss

I absolutely loved the movie. Very harrowing, very sad. Brody captured the anguish perfectly, and watching his transformation into the thin, emaciated wreck that Szpilman became. I thought that it also showed the cruelty(as well as the kindness)of man extremely well. I can't reccoment the movie enough myself.

Playitagainsam

OK, guys, let me tell you this - it was much better than "Schindler's List", because Spielberg is heavy on sentimentalism, and emotionally manipulative. I understand this film a little better than some of you, since I lived some of my life in Eastern Europe, under Communism, and Szpilman was stuck in exactly the same situation. Forced passivity, drawn from the fact that you realize your helplesness in front of things much bigger than you. This is not your run-of-the-mill heroism. Speaking of Jews under duress, has anyone seen "Europa, Europa" ? the character in that movie is very similar to the Pianist. This is how life is, folks, no Hollywood sugar-coating, no great speeches, no vain acts of useless sacrifice. In the end, though, surviving such times is heroic enough, providing that your human dignity is preserved.

I am truly sorry for those who don't see the greatness of this film, but I understand your position. Maybe you're lucky not having to understand it, since it shows you never went through tough times. Cheers!

LBPound

ncmojo, you've hit all the nails on the head. I feel the same way you do, and maybe even think it's less a film than you give it credit for.

I won't go into detail, because I'd just be repeating most of your points, but I did find it quite unusual that the direction and screenplay (the two things that specifically made me NOT like the film) were what won the awards.

NCMojo

I'll be honest: a lot of the praise being heaped upon The Pianist in this thread smacks of the kind of meaningless double-talk you often hear espoused about modern art. "Oh, this painting is clearly all about the removal of lines, of boundaries... it's encouraging us to rise above the level of an archaic media, to place within it's confines our own inhibitions and perceptions, and allow ourselves to experience..."

Wake up, people! It's a damn blank canvas. It's a fifty cent piece of paper in a two hundred dollar frame. Going back to a film as emotionally vapid as The Pianist and trying to attach emotional significance to it's lack of emotional significance... I think this is ultimately the failure of most art-house movies.

What I object to is "art" being considered more important than "entertainment". Show me something about life, yes, teach me, expand my horizons... but give me something to help me keep my focus. Throw me a friggin' bone here...

EDIT: by the way, I am not saying any of the points you all have made are, in fact, meaningless double-talk. I was making an analgy to the modern-art scene. Most of the points here have been well-presented and are carefully reasoned.

Patman

Art/music survives in these times, and due mainly to how art/music has affected others. This make these others see Szpielman in a slightly different light than the average person with less talent to give to the world in these tumultuous times. No, it's not a fair thing to do, but it's the way of the world. Those with an ability to entertain will sometimes find the most unlikeliest benefactors.

In some respects, Szpielman's art/music within him has also changed due to the experience of basically living like a musically talented rat during the war.

Without his music, Szpielman is nothing. Music sustains him when nothing else would. On the surface, it may seem like a simple story of one man's survival against huge odds, but it is the music that survives, even if Szpielman himself has changed internally in how he views the world and the value of life, and what he's willing to do to go on living.

It's true, this film is not all that sentimental (unlike Schindler's List), and it keeps the audience at bay at times, but if you invest a little of yourself into the character, a measured response is all that Szpielman had to offer if he is to make it out alive.

Jepthah

What you see as weaknesses, ncmojo, are precisely the things I see as strengths. Here you have a character who is completely unexceptional, perhaps even naive and self-centered in every way except his talent and determination to keep living. He is far more easy to relate to than the larger-than-life people in Schindler's List--the where the 'good people' are good beyond reproach, the villains are charismatic (even as Spielberg tries hard and fails to inject ambiguity)--because his experience is more representative of the randomness and chaos of the stories of so many survivors of that time. The film is a far more objective view of a nightmarish time in human history, which ends up in my opinion being far more emotionally resonant and true in the end.

Rypro 525

Maybe it's not my type of movie, but I didn't really like it either. It seemed like it was a little mixed up if this wanted to be a war type film or a art house picture about a man and his piano. (sorry, that doesn't make any sense, and feel free to flame the hell out of it, and if your point make's sense, I might even rent it again.)

DodgingCars

I liked the movie. I'm not going to go into detail about why I liked it, because I'm not sure I can. I just thought it was entertaining and moving. It was very enjoyable.

I also like Schindler's list. Personally I like Speilberg's sentementalism, etc.