What better way to spend a monday evening than getting a haircut, doing laundry, and then sitting down to watch a heavy Holocaust drama? Well, that’s exactly what I did tonight. Having rented Roman Polanski’s The Pianist through NetFlix, I decided to tackle it head on. I have mixed feelings about these types of movies. I know they’re important, but there’s also very little to motivate me to want to watch them. I mean, how often do you hear, “Hey, that dinner was great – wanna go watch Schindler’s List?” Not often, I’m guessing. Either way, The Pianist was a film I always had an interest in seeing, but couldn’t really get too motivated about doing so. (Kinda like Sunshine, which I actually have but have yet to watch.)
Anyways, the film was pretty much what I had expected. It was a serious dramatic portrayal of one man’s survival in Warsaw through World War II. It was disturbing (as most WWII films are), moving, emotional, and in a sense, uplifting. I thought it was a really excellent film, and it certainly deserved all of the acclaim it got. Adrien Brody was great, and Polanski’s depiction of wartime Poland was striking and seemed (to me, at least) rather authentic.
The music didn’t figure in as heavily as I had expected, but I did really enjoy the use of Chopin, especially “Nocturne In C-Sharp Minor”. Beautiful stuff. Wojciech Kilar’s score was very good too, although it’s sorely misrepresented on the soundtrack album with a tiny track that runs under 2-minutes long. Ah well. If you haven’t seen this one, it’s worth it.