[Quick Summary: Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish, Jewish, classical pianist, hides in Warsaw ghetto during WWII.]
I WAS SURPRISED:
1) That this script dropped me in the middle of WWII and kept me so engaged that I forgot I was in this present world.
2) That the protagonist is so passive yet active.*
Yet I couldn't stop watching. Why? It was the suspense of a man who could not control what befell him (environment), yet made decisions. What would he do next?
In the scene below, note how the man is trapped (passive) yet is still active (his reactions):
INT/EXT. 2ND APARTMENT - SZPILMAN & HIS POV - DAY
...SZPILMAN runs to the door, tries it but it's padlocked and can't open the door.
In panic, he runs back to the window.
His eyes grow wide with terror.
SZPILMAN & HIS POVE AGAIN - THE STREET
A GERMAN TANK bringing its gun to bear on the building next to his.
The gun jerks back and there's a great roaring noise.
The whole building shakes. SZPILMAN reels black, falls, gets to his feet and crawls back to the window
He sees the tank turret swiveling slowly, bringing the gun to bear directly on a lower floor of his building. The roaring noise again.
A terrific explosion. His windows are shattered. Glass everywhere. He is thrown back across the room. Smoke beings to billow and fill the room.
WHAT I'VE LEARNED: I was impressed how this script made me empathize with the impact of helplessness and gratitude for small acts of kindness.
It stirred me to want to act better, which is the highest compliment to the writer.
The Pianist (2002)(undated)
by Ronald Harwood
Based on the memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman
*Roger Ebert give a better context to the impassiveness:
Some reviews of "The Pianist" have found it too detached, lacking urgency. Perhaps that impassive quality reflects what Polanski wants to say. Almost all of the Jews involved in the Holocaust were killed, so all of the survivor stories misrepresent the actual event by supplying an atypical ending. Often their buried message is that by courage and daring, these heroes saved themselves. Well, yes, some did, but most did not and--here is the crucial point--most could not. In this respect Tim Blake Nelson's "The Grey Zone" (2001) is tougher and more honest, by showing Jews trapped within a Nazi system that removed the possibility of moral choice.
By showing Szpilman as a survivor but not a fighter or a hero--as a man who does all he can to save himself, but would have died without enormous good luck and the kindness of a few non-Jews--Polanski is reflecting, I believe, his own deepest feelings: that he survived, but need not have, and that his mother died and left a wound that had never healed. (my underline)
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