The
Pianist is the first film director Roman Polanski has made in Poland since his very
first feature. It’s also, according to the press notes, the film he’s waited
his entire career to make. It’s too bad he waited so long, because if Polanski
had made The Pianist a little earlier
into his career, it would have been that much more devastating to watch.

            I don’t know if it’s me or what, but
it’s getting to the point where I’ve become almost desensitized from watching
so many movies about World War II and Nazis and Jews and Hitler and the
Holocaust and concentration camps and genocide. And I’m sure that’s the
opposite intention of any filmmaker who attempts to tackle a picture about the
topics listed above.

            Because The Pianist won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, I was
anticipating something earth-shattering, so perhaps my expectations were a
little high. It’s still a good film, but it doesn’t really offer anything we
haven’t seen before. Had The Pianist been the first film about somebody going through hell trying to survive the
Nazi experience, I would expect people to be falling all over the film. But
it’s, like, the 96th. I wanted to love it, but I just couldn’t. Does that make
me a heel? Anyway, enough about me.

            The
Pianist opens in a 1939 Warsaw radio station, where popular pianist
Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is performing Chopin live on the air —
until German bombs blow the place apart. Wladyslaw runs home to his family, who
are about to hightail it out of the city, when the radio announces England and
France have just declared war on the Germans. Thinking things might take a turn
for the better, the Szpilmans decide to stick around and begin to busy
themselves with finding a hiding spot for their excess money, since the Germans
only allow families like theirs to keep $2,000.

            Of course, that’s just the beginning
of the humiliation and atrocities suffered by the Szpilmans and the rest of the
Jews in Poland. Soon, park benches and certain stores became off-limits. Then
they were forced to break out the Star of David badges. Then, in October 1940,
the family was forced to move into the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, where more bad
stuff happened, followed by worse stuff, followed by a forced train ride into
the country. Wladyslaw manages to escape before being sent to Treblinka, and
spends the rest of the film scampering from hiding spot to hiding spot as he
watches his city collapse from the window.

            Wladyslaw’s isolation is the only
thing that really separates The Pianist from the scores of other films with similar content. In a way, it makes the
last half of the film a lot like Cast
Away, and Brody’s performance is — thank God — strong enough to carry
the film. In one torturous scene, Wladyslaw is put up in a room that also
houses a piano, but he can’t play it because nobody is supposed to know he’s
there.

            The Pianist‘s use ambient
noise, rather than a typical score, helps drive home the banality of
Wladyslaw’s isolation. Other strong positives include cinematographer Pawel
Edelman slowly leaching the film of all its color, and the wildly incredible
sets and production design, some of which are done on an impossibly grand
scale.

            But there are still a few negatives.
For some reason, the Poles speak English, even though the Germans speak German.
There’s a scene toward the end where an increasingly decrepit Wladyslaw plays
Chopin for a special guest, but somehow manages to remedy both his permanently
slouched posture and his gnarled fingers to do so. And, worst of all, the
happy, uplifting ending brings to mind The
Sum of All Fears, which used a similar approach even though its body count
was somewhere in the millions.

            Maybe the Cannes jury ate up The Pianist because it was a true story
(Wladyslaw, who died in 2000, penned his autobiography shortly after the war).
Maybe it will be this year’s version of A
Beautiful Mind, which I liked about as much as I did this film. Both are
flawed in very different ways, and both have very strong lead performances. But
neither come close to being the best of the year.

Charles
Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of
Nicholas Nickleby was probably something I was supposed to read at some
point in high school. I have a vague recollection of taking a lengthy,
essay-style exam about it. Based on my extremely limited knowledge of the plot,
which was probably supplied moments before the test by somebody sitting next to
me, Nickleby sounded like the kind of
novel I was smart to avoid.

            But I’m older now. Wiser (slightly)
and (a little) more refined, too. When I was sent a copy of the new screen
version of Nicholas Nickleby, I didn’t have any ‘Nam-like flashbacks to
school. I watched it — the whole thing. And if I knew then what I know now, I
may have given ol’ Nickleby a crack.
Nobody mentioned that the story was this funny and campy.

            Then again, I harbor a sneaking
suspicion that writer-director Douglas McGrath gussied things up more than a
little bit to keep dolts like me interested. Nickleby is still set in 19th-century England where, after an Amélie-like opening narration, young
Nicholas (Charlie Hunnam) finds himself in the plush office of his disgustingly
wealthy Uncle Ralph (Christopher Plummer). Nicholas’s father has just died, and
what remains of his immediate family is turning to Ralph for financial
assistance.

            Being Dickensian and all, Uncle
Dirt-Bag separates Nicholas, his mother, and his sister, sending our eponymous
protagonist off with a one-eyed buggerer named Wackford Squeers (Gangs of New York‘s Jim Broadbent —
making this his second film with a one-eyed character in a month). Wackford
runs a school for young men called Dotheboys, and he wants our Nicholas to
teach there. Dotheboys, however, turns out to be little more than a prison,
where mistreated children are raised like veal while Squeers pockets the money
earmarked for their education.

            So let me get this straight: There’s
a guy named Wackford Squeers (go on, sound it out) who runs a place called
Dotheboys (sound that out, too)? And Nicholas befriends a nubile young cripple
named Smike (Jamie Bell), who he rescues while fleeing the faux school? This
Nickleby thing might have more homosexual undertones than an Eddie Murphy film.
And just when you think it can’t get any more gay, in pops Nathan Lane, whose
theatrically minded Vincent Crummles is married to a linebacker of an actress
with a face that could stop a clock (Barry Humphries). They’re just some of the
many wacky characters Nicholas and Smite meet on the way to Nickleby‘s finale, which is all about
the retribution.

            There’s more going on here, like
Uncle Ralph’s habit of trying to fix up Nicholas’s sister, Kate (Romola Garai),
with society men with busy hands, and Nicholas’s own romance with Madeline Bray
(Anne Hathaway). Hey — they’re a pair of star-crossed lovers who each have
had good television shows canceled by Fox! Still, this isn’t the Dickens that
you might remember reading back in the day. It’s Dickens via the Coen brothers,
right down to the cartoonish miser sitting behind the desk (not to mention the
camera movement and production design). It’s stylish; witty; packed with
memorable, campy performances; and it’s a whole lot of fun.

Interested
in unsanitized movie ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy, at
www.sick-boy.com, or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.

This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2003.