The true story of celebrated Jewish composer and concert pianist Władysław Szpilman (Adrien Brody), detailing his odyssey of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto, the horrors of war, and the German officer (Thomas Kretschmann) who saves his life. Polanski, six years old when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, was a survivor of the Kraków Ghetto and witnessed his father being taken away to a Nazi death camp. His mother would die in Auschwitz. As Manohla Dargis wrote, “Polanski has spent his entire filmmaking career making movies that, steeped in alienation and paranoia, carry traces of the Holocaust. This time, faced with the historical event, he tempers his style, and the alienation and paranoia creep in from the outside, unescorted and relentless. With THE PIANIST, Polanski’s strange genius serves Szpilman’s remembrance.”
“A tour de force of claustrophobia and surreal desperation… One of the very few non documentary movies about Jewish life and death under the Nazis that can be called definitive."
– A.O.Scott, The New York Times
“Polanski’s cinematic return to the ravaged world of his childhood starts inauspiciously… Once Szpilman is left behind, however…his struggle simply to survive is rendered with increasing subtlety, and Brody’s [Oscar®-winning] lead performance steadily comes into its own. Old-fashioned in both visual and narrative style and in its overall restraint, the film clearly benefits from the director’s first-hand knowledge of the territory.”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)
