AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT ARCHIVE 2003

THE PIANIST by Harlan Kennedy Roman Polanski didn’t film his own boyhood story of growing up as a guest of the Holocaust. But those memories, on his own avowal, inform and inspire THE PIANIST. If there is nothing quite as quirky here as the young Polanski’s use of a false foreskin to fool Nazis searching for signs of Jewishness, there are craft, skill and encompassing period detail in Ronald Harwood’s screenplay based on the memoirs of Nazi-evading pianist Wladek Szpilman. Adrien Brody plays the Jewish ivory-pounder whose family is hauled off to Treblinka while he escapes to survive from day to day in bomb-pounded Warsaw. Immaculate photography; good acting; and moments of heart-seizing shock, like the wheelchaired old Jew tipped off a balcony when he won’t stand up and salute. It is the genius of the director of REPULSION, CHINATOWN and TESS to make the terrible seem casual and the casual terrible. From a line of Jewish laborers believing they’re safe from death because they carry work cards, half a dozen are picked out to kneel and be shot in the head. A family flushed from an apartment building is allowed to flee down the street – and to be picked off by bullets one by one. Brody’s performance fits this nightmarish world of sudden horror and insouciant nightmare. Fear creeps out from deep inside him; the outside is all stoicism, eyes of darting intelligence, and quick speech rhythms that like those of many actors here – including Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman as Szpilman’s parents – brilliantly suggest, without mimicking, foreign inflection. THE PIANIST won the Palme d’Or, the highest award possible at the 2002 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL. In January 2003, the New York Film Critics, assembled, named it the best film of 2002. And then gave the acting and writing awards, respectively, to Adrien Brody and Ronald Harwood. NEXT… COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved.