THE PIANIST (2002) ***1/2 It must be an incredible experience for Roman Polanski when he walks across the room, daily experience must be unbearable until he releases that black humor outlet. Everything is so incredibly visual, what dialogue there is, is such that everything around it would evaporate in its absence, but still it is so secondary as remain an afterthought, glue out of a magician's bottle. Several scenes of such incredible, horrible truth and beauty; the observation of the Warsaw Rebellion through the inspired cinematic device of the window: so puny and pathetic, so hopeless, so indescribably courageous that it poses a threat-imposes a death sentence-on the greater powers that stumble and are revealed to be awkward as well as arrogant. The inexorable and devastating passage of time through structures and constructs. Of course Polanski was there, and his struggles with expression are those of emphasis and the expression of that that defies clarity. It may be that Polanski's greatest achievement here-and Spielberg's in Schindler's List -is to convey that the Nazis weren't all about the gas chamber. That was just the end, only licking the envelope; fascism was about the daily humiliations to turn a man from being a man. Where Spielberg found himself occasionally battling his own inclination (instinct?) to dive in to some comfortable formulaic mythological approach, Polanski releases unbearable tensions with the occasional dark, not bitter joke, the angel before the flames, or some bewildered and beleaguered humanity trying to move in some way. And that's not just Adrien Brody, that's Polanski himself, that's you, and that's me. That's you, and that's me, but the understanding is that what's depicted here is something very, very else.
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