John Calley, a former Warner Bros. President, once said of director Stanley Kubrick, “He was one of the people that sort of knew what was wrong with the world, in a weird way. And he was able to turn that into art. He didn’t grouse about it, or bitch, or write lousy editorials. He converted it into something amazing and important for us as a species.”
One can see everyone who encountered Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), otherwise known as ‘The Pianist,’ of Roman Polanski’s recent film of the same name, felt a hint of that importance in him, as well. A Jewish socialist organizer in a Warsaw ghetto even tells him he’ll never be a good activist because he’s too much of a musician.
Initially there seems to be something periodical about Szpilman’s art: he first works for a Warsaw radio station, after which he plays music at a ghetto restaurant. And save for a brief scene, we never even hear Szpilman’s own work. Like a newsman dispensing quick fixes of wisdom that readers see, at times too obvious to be their own, Szpilman is appreciated, yet his importance is easily overlooked by those who hear him play–even though he is the greatest pianist in Poland.
This is not Steven Spielberg’s story of luck, of lives saved by jammed pistols and chance, or inside connections; nor is Szpilman an everyman facing impossible odds. Polanski makes it clear that people save Szpilman for a reason.
The Pianist is not just a tale of the man himself either. As Polanski shows, with some of his most brilliant images, Szpilman as only partly in control of the music his hands create, his fingers moving almost automatically over the keyboard. Visually confounding after a while, these hand shots become supernatural: not only are they reminiscent of ‘Thing,’ the independently mobile hand of The Addams Family, but, as Szpilman withers away from malnutrition, it is nearly impossible to believe he is playing with such vitality.
Yet this is because it is not he who is playing. When the inspired artist creates, divinity is infused into mere notes, brushstrokes and words. In art, humans have snatched a piece of the eternal, the sacred–the catalyst of dreams.
Szpilman, who carries that art within himself, must shield the dreams of mankind through the nightmare it has made of the world through war, and back to peace. In one particularly daunting shot, Polanski cranes from an eye-level shot of a wall up to an overheard spot that shows the remains of a section of occupied Warsaw long after it had been abandoned: blocks and blocks of ashy, white ruin stretching into oblivion. This is the world without art; a world whose god is dead. This is the world Szpilman must amend.
The scenery doesn’t matter: Whether in the most horrific, hellish of places or a ritzy symphony hall in a European capital, the music takes everyone to the same, elevated place. Those who saved Szpilman probably couldn’t explain why except to say to not do so would deal a sickening blow to humanity–not to Jews, not to Nazis, but to humans. We revere art because it saves us from ourselves and, as Polanski shows, up there among fast fingers and watery eyes, that uniforms cease to matter.
