A Lesson With Punch.(The Pianist)

The most frequent criticism of any film that is based on a powerful personal memoir is that the screen version takes too many liberties with what was written, resorting to troubling distortions or outright inventions. Not so in the case of Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," which portrays the wartime story of Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman. As his son Andrzej Szpilman puts it, "This is an honest rendition of my father's memoirs. The film shows the whole truth." But when Polanski's film held its world premiere in Warsaw recently, the enthusiastic applause for a native son's return was tempered by the distinctly chilly response of several critics. In effect, they're charging that Polanski tells the story too faithfully. That too much history makes for too little artistry. That the movie is too didactic. The reviewer for NEWSWEEK's Polish-language edition complained that the result is no more than "a film lesson about the war and the Holocaust for high school students."

Part of the problem is that Szpilman, as played by Adrien Brody, isn't a hero or a villain. He's a survivor. Eluding capture by the Germans because of the courage of friends and strangers and several near- miraculous escapes, he witnesses the trauma of Warsaw under occupation, from the debasement and deportations of Jews (including his entire family), to the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 and the general Warsaw uprising of 1944. While others perform incredible acts of heroism or resort to collaboration, extortion and denunciations, Szpilman hides, watching from behind the windows of empty apartments. He remains focused on his goal of living through the hell he sees all around him, rarely betraying more complex emotions. Frustrated by his "enigmatic" presence, the film reviewer of the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza protested that the viewer "wants to know more, feel more."

Maybe so, but what makes "The Pianist" a truly impressive film is that it presents its central figure as what he is, resisting the temptation to glamorize him. In that sense, Szpilman probably is a more representative figure than the heroes of other films about World War II and the Holocaust. And "The Pianist" is equally meticulous in not glamorizing or demonizing any group, including Polish Jews and Catholics--even Germans, although there's never any doubt who is responsible for the orgy of death and destruction that takes place on a ...