Life mirrored through work

10 April 2012

First of all, it's not a story about the Holocaust. That grim event was about the deaths of six million Jews. Roman Polanski's film is about the salvation of one of them, a virtuoso concert pianist who survived the Warsaw ghetto.

Secondly, the film-maker is remarkably like his protagonist. Polanski, a fugitive from American justice-if not the Nazi storm troopers, has been practising his art since 1977 in juridically prudent self-exile in Continental Europe, where he's safe from extradition.

Wladyslaw Szpilman, the real-life Polish musician played by Adrien Brody, subsisted in the narrower and more lethal confines of the ghetto by practising his art in his mind, or occasionally with his fingers hovering a few tantalising inches above the keyboard he dared not sound.

The music in his thoughts is so confidently echoed by the music on the soundtrack that, the first time I saw the film at Cannes, the scene led me to believe he was rash enough to play within earshot of the enemy. After a second viewing, I apologise for my error.

No doubt in my mind, however, that Polanski identifies the martyred man's fate with his own. Maybe he hopes the film winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year may mitigate his alleged offence against a minor in California 25 years earlier and let him resume his career in Hollywood. Perhaps.

But even a fresh viewing does not convince me that The Pianist lives up to its pretensions or the responsibilities of history. Its failure is partly due to Polanski's personality.

His 1984 autobiography, a self-confessed story of an unreliable witness to his life, lacks any feeling about his own family life in the Cracow ghetto. His Russian-born mother vanished one day, presumably into Auschwitz: he reports it like a news event.

His father, an unfocused figure, survived incarceration to hike home now and then with a mistress in tow. His son couldn't care less. The book's title, Roman, is also the French word for "fiction": its factual accuracy is certainly less well vouched for than the autobiography written by Szpilman.

Polanski fails to bring to the film of Szpilman's life the very element he leaves out of his own story: empathetic emotion. For most of its length, The Pianist is a dispassionate inventory of ethnic slurs, personal humiliations and criminal acts committed by German forces on the Warsaw Jews.

It is damning evidence, but oddly detached. Seeing Jews lined up and shot through their skulls, one by one, with conveyor-belt efficiency; an old man in a wheelchair tipped out of a fifth-floor window like dustbin rubbish; wives who have lost husbands, raving in the streets; mothers who suffocated their babies while hiding them - these and many other atrocities should be emotionally overwhelming.

They are merely numbing. Their inclusion doesn't match the historical enormities, or even provide persuasive feeling that the victims of one of the war's worst genocides don't simply take off costumes and make-up and go out on the town at the end of the day's shoot.

Polanski's tableauesque style is redolent of routine filmmaking 50 years ago. It lacks the fluent blend of horror, pathos, absurdity and even grim black humour that made last year's Czech film, Divided We Fall, on an identical theme of a Jew in hiding, so structurally audacious and emotionally devastating (Get it out when it becomes available on video in the UK: you'll experience better than any words of mine what I mean).

The Poles in The Pianist speak English - the Germans, German. Such a convention has had its day. You cannot make a film with mature pretensions to authenticity by putting it into a language that strips the characters of their national identity and thus of their dramatic authenticity. Szpilman's family (Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman as his father and mother) sound like Hampstead bourgeoisie.

Their responses to the gathering catastrophe are submerged in dialogue that, early on especially, sounds forced and stagy. Brody is better cast, but it's telling that his character only hits a truly tragic keynote after his family is deported and he is stranded in the ghetto, feigning death as troops stomp by him, or running from one safe house to the next. It's not his fault if he fails to carry the film. The character is passive: he depends on others to survive.

He doesn't participate, he reacts. Mainly, he observes. The sharpest documentary scenes in Ronald Harwood's script are, in fact, those where Szpilman is absent from the action, simply surveying the street chaos, executions and partisan vengeance from a top-floor window of his current hidey-hole.

Only once did I feel emotionally-"inside" him. A German tank shells his refuge. A shell ruptures the wall and, temporarily, his hearing. For a second or two, via a muffled soundtrack, we share the agony of a latter-day Beethoven losing one of his essential faculties.

Only in the last 20 minutes does Szpilman interact with anyone who generates feelings deeper than conventional interest. A German captain ( Thomas Kretschmann), another real-life figure, discovers him hiding, and compels the hirsute Jew to prove his claim to be a pianist by playing a classical piece.

No fictional film of any seriousness would have risked such a kitschy scene: here it succeeds because its unlikelihood is the truth. Even so, the surprisingly good temper of a grand piano left untuned for years in a blitzed building, never mind the fluency of a pianist whose fingers have been forced into rough labour, risk rendering the recital laughably ersatz.

The German Samaritan enters the film too late in the day to enable The Pianist to do more than sound an ironic note about good music dissolving enmities. Instead, it tries for pathos: the good German disappears into the Russian cage, defeating Szpilman's attempt to return the deed.

Nevertheless, the film's most telling line is from the German, not the Jew: "We survive because God wants us to - at least that's what we believe." It's a cynicism I imagine the director of this honourable, but disappointing film would subscribe to: very Polish, very Polanski.

The Pianist
Cert: 15

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