Film: A Nocturne Detached

The hardest thing in the world is just to say something. Because when we try to, meaning is thrown in, as is morality; some sort of glint or twinge that evokes a purpose. What good was there in saying "that" and what sort of meaningful addition did "this" bring to our life? But there are certain things that to do any rightful justice to, it can only be said and nothing more. And for The Pianist, Roman Polanski absorbed this notion fully.

This is life, drawn out from memory onto the screen. While you can sing praises day and night for Polanski's brilliant vision and his genius as a director to bring all this - this brutal tattered display of a man caught in the chaotic raping of Warsaw - to realization in perfect detail, you won't. For in doing so you remind yourself that this was a movie again: You know, two and a half hours of celluloid pulp that when fully digested will leave a warm fuzzy aftertaste and a slight Oscarish burp.

What Polanski created looks just like the images of history, and the characters portrayed in The Pianist resemble the flickering nameless faces in old movie reels. All of them, they're nobodies dredged from the past. You can hardly call Adrien Brodie's Szpilman the leading character because he didn't do anything save survive; it's as if a camera followed him around for five years with interjections of music and editing. Coming to the end of the ordeal, Szpilman has fallen even from redemption. He's become a ghost looking down at mad desperation and mayhem, seeking only survival of body. It's nothing but pitiful watching him drink out of some latrine bucket in desperate need of water and seeing him coddle a can of cucumbers as if it were his savior and babe all at once. What little hope one can eke out from his survival by luck is muted by a raging feeling of injustice, provoked by scenes of disgust when Szpilman, having the chance to help, just walked on.

Don't see this film looking for a story. See it to remind yourself of the darkness that passes so easily through the eyes of man. Because as a story, there's no meaning in it, no hope or salvation, just a plot of horrific detail seen through a broken window pane by the eyes of a man a nocturne detached from sympathy, reduced to a single grain of sand smashed through the revolting cogs of the machine of war.