Friday Minute
No. 91 | May 7, 2010

Plight of the Piano Player

Our theme this week
Piano-playing protagonists in peril

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste) (1960)
Tuesday         —   Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Wednesday    —   The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) (2001)
Thursday        —   Shine (1996)

The Pianist (2002)

What can you say about Roman Polanski?  With a certain scandal in the news lately, it’s hard to find a kind word about the man.  Yet it shouldn’t be controversial to say that Polanski is one of the outstanding film artists of our time.  His body of work is impressive:  Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, Tess, The Pianist, and The Ghost Writer.  (The current court case is outside my beat, but for the record, I have no patience for the argument that Polanski should be exempt from justice because of his film work over the years, nor for the argument that his work should be boycotted.  Both are very wrongheaded ideas, if you ask me.  Not that anyone did.)

If Polanski were to make a film of his own story, I think he’d take an approach you’re not likely to find in today’s media.  You get a sense of it in The Pianist, a film about Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish pianist who barely survived the German occupation during World War II.  Szpilman is a talented musician whose only crime is that he’s a Jew.  The film is about the Holocaust (and among other things, extraordinary survival and art), but Polanski, who lost his mother in Auschwitz, is not primarily interested in moral judgment.  The horror is a given, but the film seeks, as much as than anything else, understanding.  That seems to me what the best art is all about.

Adrien Brody gives a tour-de-force performance as Szpilman.  We meet him in a Warsaw radio studio, at the piano, unwilling to leave mid-song as the first bombs fall.  But soon he is knocked to the floor, the concert has ended, and his life will never again be the same.  He loses his family, his friends, his country, and the war grinds on.  As the years pass Szpilman is witness to, and victim of, unspeakable brutality.  His body is wasted, all vigor is gone, yet somehow he survives.  Toward the end of the fighting Szpilman is caught by a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann), who asks what he does.  “I am—I was a pianist.”  They walk into the next room.  “Play something.”  Szpilman takes a seat at a piano and plays Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23.  It’s a not-so-subtle statement from Polanski.  The German is moved, and Szpilman is saved.

After the war Wladyslaw Szpilman resumed his music career, performing and composing.  In 1945 he wrote his memoir, republished by his son five decades later.  Szpilman lived until 2000.   Polanski’s film is a remarkable tribute.

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The Pianist
Roman Polanski, director
Trailer

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The Pianist
Adrien Brody

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Quote of Note
“I’m sitting here in my own house, minding my own business, playing my own piano.  I don’t think you can make a crime out of that.’”
—Vienna (Joan Crawford), Johnny Guitar (1954)

…58…59…60.