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THE PIANIST
 "It's
Roman Polanski's strongest and most personally felt movie. This
should not come as a great surprise, since as a child Polanski survived
the KrakU^w ghetto and lost family members in the Holocaust. The
real surprise is that the horrors on display in 'The Pianist' are
presented matter-of-factly--which of course makes them seem
even more horrific...At times, the tension between the unwavering
directness of his technique and the anguish that is behind it is
almost unbearable. When we see a Nazi soldier casually shoot a Jewish
girl in the head for asking an innocent question, or when we see
soldiers throw an old man in a wheelchair over a balcony, we are
staring into an everyday inferno... In 'The Pianist,' suffering
is seen with such clarity that its relief becomes a balm of the
greatest magnitude. It's the relief we get when Szpilman plays the
piano again, or merely makes it through another day. In moments
like these, we are confronted with the significance, the momentousness,
of the ordinary." -- Peter
Rainer, New York
"I must report that during the screening of the movie, I felt an
excruciating sensation of helplessness and hopelessness, as if the
Holocaust were still about to happen, and the poor wretches on the
screen could not begin to anticipate the totality of the event...What
makes 'The Pianist' authentically Polanskian is the absurdist detachment
of the artist who keeps practicing his art even when the world is
crumbling around him...Mr. Polanski is in his element here: alone,
abandoned, but still consoled by his art, which is more than he
has ever revealed before about the source of his spiritual survival."
-- Andrew Sarris, The New
York Observer
"Mr. Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans
arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak,
acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both
cynicism and compassion. When death is at once so systematically
and so capriciously dispensed, survival becomes a kind of joke.
By the end of the film, Szpilman, brilliantly played by Adrien Brody,
comes to resemble one of Samuel Beckett's gaunt existential clowns,
shambling through a barren, bombed-out landscape clutching a jar
of pickles. He is like the walking punchline to a cosmic jest of
unfathomable cruelty...This is certainly the best work Mr. Polanski
has done in many years." -- A.O. Scott,
The New York Times
"Polanski, who escaped the Krakow ghetto when he was a child, has
spent his entire filmmaking career making movies that, steeped in
alienation and paranoia, carry traces of the Holocaust. This time,
faced with the historical event, he tempers his style, and the alienation
and paranoia creep in from the outside, unescorted and relentless...In
his book and in Polanski's telling, the musician's tortuous journey
is neither triumphant nor beautiful; it is, rather, a testament
to the essential human desire to live." -- Manohla
Dargis, The Los Angeles Times
"Adrien Brody gives a magnificent performance as the refined musician
who sinks lower and lower as the war wears on. Toward the end, he
is reduced to something out of a pathetic silent comedy...Polanski
films the story in a dry-eyed way that goes for the telling detail
rather than the melodrama. He shows the small grotesqueries of daily
life in the ghetto...Polanski, working in Poland after an absence
of 40 years, constructs an indelibly vivid picture of the city."
-- Jami Bernard, The New York
Daily News
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