The Pianist is a 2002 biographical war drama film directed by Roman Polanski, written by Ronald Harwood and starring Adrien Brody. It is an adaptation of Death of a City, a World War II memoir by the Polish-Jewish musician Władysław Szpilman. The film is a co-production between Poland, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

 

Filmmaker Roman Polanski, who as a boy growing up in Poland watched while the Nazis devastated his country during World War II, directed this downbeat drama based on the true story of a privileged musician who spent five years struggling against the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a gifted classical pianist born to a wealthy Jewish family in Poland. The Szpilmans have a large and comfortable flat in Warsaw which Wladyslaw shares with his mother and father (Maureen Lipman and Frank Finlay), his sisters Halina and Regina (Jessica Kate Meyer and Julia Rayner), and his brother, Henryk (Ed Stoppard). While Wladyslaw and his family are aware of the looming presence of German forces and Hitler's designs on Poland, they're convinced that the Nazis are a menace which will pass, and that England and France will step forward to aid Poland in the event of a real crisis. Wladyslaw's naïveté is shattered when a German bomb rips through a radio studio while he performs a recital for broadcast. During the early stages of the Nazi occupation, as a respected artist, he still imagines himself above the danger, using his pull to obtain employment papers for his father and landing a supposedly safe job playing piano in a restaurant. But as the German grip tightens upon Poland, Wladyslaw and his family are selected for deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. Refusing to face a certain death, Wladyslaw goes into hiding in a comfortable apartment provided by a friend. However, when his benefactor goes missing, Wladyslaw is left to fend for himself and he spends the next several years dashing from one abandoned home to another, desperate to avoid capture by German occupation troops. The Pianist was based on the memoir of the same name by the reallife Wladyslaw Szpilman; the book was first published in 1946 as Death of a City, but was banned by Polish Communist officials and went out of print until 1998, when a new edition was issued as The Pianist.

 

The Pianist received positive reviews from film critics. It has a 96% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 178 reviews with an average rating of 8.2/10 and the consensus, "Well-acted and dramatically moving, The Pianist is Polanski's best work in years." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave a positive review of the film, noting that "perhaps that impassive quality reflects what (director Roman) Polanski wants to say... 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... his own deepest feelings: that he survived, but need not have, and that his mother died and left a wound that had never healed."

 

The Pianist met with significant critical praise and received multiple awards and nominations. At the 75th Academy Awards, The Pianist won Oscars for Best Director (Polanski), Best Adapted Screenplay (Ronald Harwood) and Best Actor (Brody), and was also nominated for four other awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was awarded the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, BAFTA Award for Best Film, BAFTA Award for Best Direction in 2003 and seven French Césars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Brody.