Rating: 
Summary: A moving story of courage and the fierce will to survive.
Review: Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" is the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a brilliant young pianist who lives with his family in Poland when the Germans march in and take over the country. Szpilman and his family struggle to survive under increasingly difficult conditions, and through their eyes we experience the increasingly tight noose that the Nazis wrap around the neck of the Polish Jews. Soon, the Nazis herd the Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto, and ultimately, into cattle cars headed for concentration camps. It was a fluke that Szpilman did not go with his family to the camps. He went into hiding in Poland and was helped by some compassionate people who kept him alive with meager amounts of food and drink. However, he suffered horrifying days and nights of fear and loneliness and it is a miracle that he did not go mad. It is clear that Szpilman's love of music (he played the piano in his mind) helped keep him going during his ordeal. Polanski direction is fine, although he breaks little new thematic ground in this film. What makes this movie special is the superb performance of Adrien Brody, who plays Szpilman with restraint and great sensitivity. Brody captures Szpilman's obsession with his music as well as his desperate struggle to survive each day, knowing that it might be his last. Brody's transformation from a dapper and poised professional into a starving and desperate refugee is amazing. Kudos go to cinematographer Pawel Edelman for his apocalyptic scenes of rubble strewn Warsaw. "The Pianist" is a little too long at 148 minutes. It could easily have been trimmed to two hours without losing any of its impact. However, I recommend this film mostly for the soulful performance of Adrien Brody, who plays Szpilman as if he were born for this role.
Rating:
Summary: In the same league with "Schindler's List"
Review: Director Roman Polanski has contributed to film history some of its darker classics ("Chinatown," et al), and "The Pianist" may well be his best work in a generally magnificent body of work. For whatever reason, though, the film generated little box office excitement until it pulled off a couple of major upsets in the 2003 Oscar race, winning best director for Polanski and best actor for Adrien Brody, neither of whom was even cited in most "favored" lists. But the film is destined to be a likely classic in the same class as "Schindler's List." Polanski's film is distinquished from its predecessor in that it recounts a single man's fight to survive the Holocaust of Hitler's Third Reich in the six years between 1939 and 1945, whereas "Schindler ..." gave us the triumphant account of another single man's fight to save as many condemned Jews as he can. "The Pianist" is Wladislaw Spillman, a piano virtuoso for Radio Warsaw and a Polish Jew marked for consignment to one of the concentration camps for Jews condemend in the "final solution." But Spillman's spirit to survive inspires him to evade his intended captors literally under their noses by remaining in the escalating ruins of his beloved city. But by war's end, Spillman has disintegrated physically from hunger, emotional devastation and a challenge to his faith in humankind while nonetheless maintaining his will to live as a servant to his people and as a witness to the horrors of the darkest chapter in human history. Supposedly a biographic treatment of the real Spillman's experiences, the film may well also be autobiographical for Polanski, himself a survivor of the Holocaust. As Spillman, Brody is simply overwhelming in projecting both the terror of his life and in refusing to surrender to it. His performance is magnificently framed by Polanski's miraculous eye for visual ruin and devastation. Overall, the film is paralyzing, and its realism may be a bit too much to endure without getting up for a breath of air. Brody and Polanski clearly paid their dues in earning their worthy Oscars, and their collective energies qualify their film as an important contribution to the study of the Holocaust.
Rating:
Summary: Great movie
Review: My wife and I absolutely were inspired by this movie. Adrian Brody should win Best Actor. He did an outstanding job portraying the lead character. This movie reminds me a lot of the movie, "Schindler's List". The pianist lived a comfortable and up-scale lifestyle with his family in Poland. Later, when the persecution of the Jews gradually (with emphasis on gradually) escalated, he found himself and his family ostracized by wearing arm bands, relocated to a ghetto, etc. His ultimate triumph over his obstacles allow him to be victorious. The incident with the German general is rather touching and provacative. Outstanding movie...
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely riveting
Review: What an incredible film. I left the theatre with a sense of the weight of what Szpilman endured. You can read about what happened a hundred times, but watching it -- often through the eyes of Szpilman -- you are a witness, and the realism of the occupation is riveting and disturbing. No absurd heroics, no supermodel actresses, no contrived ending -- and a TRUE story on top of it. The casting and performances are superb. I could imagine myself around the dinner table as the Szpilman's read the decree about wearing the identifying Star of David armbands, reading the newspaper about the establishment of the ghetto. The scenes immediately before and after the deportation will stay with you forever. Polanski uses almost infinite details to bring home the message that real lives were loaded onto those cattle cars. I noticed a few complaints about the pace being slow after Szpilman avoids deportation. Really, if you were hiding in any attic to avoid German bullets and scavenging any bit of bread, the long periods of isolation and hunger are integral to the story. Yes, it's a long film, but I thought Polanski used the length to the right effect and even manages the cuts smoothly. No scene felt excessively long. If anything, the Warsaw ghetto uprising (4 days) was covered too briefly, in my opinion. It was the defining event in the Jewish resistance, worth a script of its own. The starkness of the violence, in the context of a realistic portrayal of life in Warsaw, lends it a vividness that no conventional action movie could approach. The deaths aren't over-choreographed movie deaths -- each one gets to you, as it should. There's no question in my mind that is one of the most affecting films made. That's not to take anything away from Schindler's List, which is of the same caliber. But The Pianist feels so personal that it generates its drama from our attachment to the main character. The Holocaust has yielded so many unimaginably horrible images that this telling, which never takes into the death camps, is powerful for what it doesn't do, even as it pulls us into the victim's perspective. Absolutely superb and memorable in all respects.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best films ever about the Holocaust.
Review: In an earlier review, I proclaimed "Chicago" the best film of 2002. Now I realize my judgment was hasty: "The Pianist" is really the year's best film. Roman Polanski has fashioned a horrifying, deeply moving film based on the life of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who manages through the kindness of friends and strangers and the sheerest strokes of luck to survive in Warsaw during the six years of World War II. Polanski's understated style makes the horrors he records all the more powerful, as Nazis matter-of-factly murder Jews in the street for no other reason than that they can. Polanski actually lived through these atrocities, and makes them absolutely real on the screen. Polanski also had the enormous luck to find the perfect actor to play Szpilman, the young American actor Adrien Brody. With his soulful eyes and aquiline, otherworldly face, Brody was born to play Szpilman; in a performance that is nearly wordless through long stretches of the film, he moves us to tears. Brody brings Szpilman to breathtaking life, a decent, reasonable, exceptionally talented man in a world where decency, reason and talent count for less than nothing. In the early portions of the film, Brody bears more than a passing resemblance to portraits of Chopin; toward the end, long-haired and scraggly-bearded after years of hiding in bombed-out buildings, he looks like Jesus on the road to Calvary. There is one scene in which, ordered by a German officer to play, Szpiilman plays a Chopin ballade--the first time he has touched a piano in years. The performance, technically choppy but impassioned, reaches heights of emotion the cinema rarely achieves. This moment, and many others in the film, are magnificent testaments to the artistry of Polanski and Brody. At the end, it's not that you shouldn't leave before the credits are finished rolling, as Szpilman returns to his old life at the end of the war, playing Chopin's Grande Polonaise with the Warsaw Philharmonic, the beauty of the performance and the human triumph it represents leave you transfixed in your seat. No other non-documentary film about the Holocaust--not even "Schindler's List"--has moved me as deeply as "The Pianist."
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing Holocaust portrayal
Review: Roman Polanski masterfully portrays the horrors of the Holocaust in Poland evoking feelings of fury, bewilderment, disbelief and digust bordering on nausea in The Piano. We observe the devastation of Warsaw through the eyes of Adrien Brody expertly playing Wladyslaw Szpilman, a celebrated and brilliant Jewish concert pianist. As the country is attacked by the Nazis, Szpilman and his family naively hope for their speedy liberation as the British and the French enter the fray. Progressively more and more restrictions are placed on Jews as the discrimination of anti Semitism grows. Finally they are herded with almost 500,000 others in the deplorable conditions of the cramped Warsaw ghetto. There while trying to subsist by grovelling for meager food rations, Jews are wantonly murdered at the whim of their Nazi captors. Eventually the ghetto is emptied as the inhabitants are stuffed into railroad cars for eventual extermination at the Treblinka death camp. Szpilman is literally pulled from the railroad car by a friend and now a member of the traitorous Jewish police and told to run away. Szpilman is then hidden from place to place by sympathetic Polish people while observing the revolting plight of the Jewish people and the ravages of war. Starving, and desperate he manages to survive among the ruins of Warsaw as the war draws to an end. As the Russians approach Warsaw he is detected in the attic of a demolished building by a compassionate Nazi captain. The captain brings him food and warm clothing to sustain him until he is rescued by Russian forces. Szpilman amazingly survives to resurrect his career and manages to remain in his beloved Warsaw. He endeavors unsuccessfully to learn of the fate of the kind hearted Nazi captain who helped him retain his life. Polanski using his many boyhood memories of warn torn Poland weaves a haunting film with authentic looking sets of war decimated Warsaw. This memorable movie belongs along side Schindler's List in delivering the mind searing and disturbing messages born out of genocide.
Rating:
Summary: Masterly
Review: ...This is not as it was, and perhaps therefore also some other reviewers got an impression that Szpilman - the Panist, spent all the war time in the ghetto. In fact, about one hour into the movie time, he leaves the ghetto and starts living alone in an apartment provided him by his Polish friends. The battle scenes the Pianist sees from that apartment window is the 1944 Poland underground army uprising that lasted two months and spread over the whole city. The uprising by the Polish-Jewish resistance fighters in the ghetto happened a year earlier - in 1943. The 1943 uprising led to destruction of the ghetto by the German army, the 1944 uprising led to destruction of 80% of the city buildings by the German army (it left the remaining 20% for its own accomodation). The Pianist struggles in a destroyed Warsaw, not the ghetto alone. I hope this clarification is helpful for you. The movie is very good indeed and A. Brody's performance leaves a strong impression. Also, the music is selected very thoughtfully. Chopin prevails, but the inclusion of the great Bach ! violin sonata actually played by one of the woman-heroes of this story is for me one of the movie highest points.
Rating:
Summary: Brody's performance is incredibly moving.
Review: I finally saw this, and I thought it was very good, if rather depressing. I don't think I'll see it again because, to me, the Holocaust is so horrible that it's difficult for me to endure even representations of it on film. I was surprised by the fact that it wasn't a traditional Holocaust story, for it strands Adrien Brody's character off by himself while every other Jewish character is sent to the death camps. The film also shows how it is a hollow victory to live when everyone around you, everyone you care about is dead. Brody's portrayal is excellent, though. He's isolated, near-starving, gaunt and thin throughout the latter half of the film. He's quiet, with a sad desperation in his eyes. Sometimes, the less performers say, the more volumes the performance speaks. Brody, whom I've paid attention to for years since he was axed from THIN RED LINE, really comes into his own with this role. The last half hour, when Brody's character receives help from a rather unlikely source before his ultimate survival of the war, is the best, played with mostly long pauses. As Brody sits at the piano to play for this new "friend," the film reaches a crescendo, as well. Finally given an opportunity to express all his emotion, after years of forced silence, the character unleashes himself, at first pensively, on the piano, and that illustration of his pain is incredibly moving. As a personal, autobiographical take on the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, Roman Polanski has returned to top form.
Rating:
Summary: Subtle, mesmerizing, great movie
Review: "The pianist" is Roman Polanski's movie about the Second World War and, specifically, the Holocaust in Poland. The movie tells the story of Wladislaw Spillman, excellent pianist of Radio Warsaw. Being a jew, and polish, Spillman had to fight for survival during the six years of the war, from the early days during german invasion and outbreak of the war, through the life inside the jewish ghetos, the threat of the concentration camps, and the constant hunger and hiding from nazi troops. From what I've heard, the movie script follows Spillman's autobiography to the letter. But, more than that, "The pianist" has Polanski's insights and memories from his personal struggle during the war. Even so, the movie manages to be very emotive without being corny. Aside from that, Polanski was able to make "The pianist" not a movie about religion, which is important if he intended to make a complete movie, not focusing the audience's attention in religious matters, or even not trying to understand and find motives for the war. If you pay attention, not once during the movie we see a jew character praying or invoking God's name. The sets are remarkably authentic (at least for me, born 40 years after the conclusion of the war). There are some strong scenes (alleatory executions mostly), made stronger because of the subtle tension Polanski was able to put in his direction. The whole movie is "strong", to say the least. The second half is a lesson in acting provided by Adrien Brody, an actor whose performances were very criticised until now, but whose sad face, deep voice, and thin body were able to pass an enormous sense of will to live in the screen (woth some funny scenes too, if you think that is possible in a movie about the Holocaust). I will never forget the scene when Spillman plays the piano for the german officer; Spillman was madly hungry, and even so he was able to forget his can of food and, with his perfect music, feed the spiritualy poor german (I know, it's cliche, but it's an excellent scene anyway). Since the Academy will never give an Oscar to "Lord of the Rings", "The pianist" is, in my opinion, the favourite among this year's Best Movie nominees. Grade 9.1/10
Rating: 
Summary: Great Acting, Great Story, So-So Movie
Review: I must say that the acting in this film was very convincing and Adrian Brody was perfect for the role. The story was great and even more so because it was true...but maybe a little too true. This movie could have been a lot better. Like the film "Cast Away", it showed way to much of the main character isolated and doing nothing, instead of showing more of his life before the holocaust and after. If the movie had shown more of that, it could have been a lot better.
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