The Pianist Review

Polanski escaped the Kraków Ghetto as a child after his mother's death, and he approaches Szpilman's memoir with a restraint that reads as knowledge rather than caution. Szpilman is no fighter. He is pulled out of the line at the railhead while his family is taken, smuggles a few weapons, and then spends years in borrowed rooms watching history through windows: the Ghetto Uprising, the Warsaw Uprising, the city reduced to rubble. Paweł Edelman shoots those views flat and unemphatic, and the ghetto built on the Babelsberg backlot and in Warsaw's Praga district never looks like a set.

Adrien Brody, cast after an open call of more than 1,400 hopefuls in London came up empty, won the Oscar by shrinking: he grows thinner, quieter and more animal as the film goes on, until the long final section in the ruins and the encounter with the German officer Wilm Hosenfeld over a Chopin ballade. A. O. Scott compared Szpilman to one of Beckett's gaunt clowns clutching a jar of pickles, and warned that the Hosenfeld scene courts sentimentality by tying a love of art to decency. That reservation is fair, and small. It won the Palme d'Or, three Oscars and seven Césars.