At one time in my life, I read a lot of Holocaust memoirs. It was an effort to understand what had happened, but I also think I had a need to see exactly what humanity was capable of. The systematic brutality of the camps contrasted sharply with random acts of violence by individual Nazis, and both of these contrasted with the narrators' fierce determination to survive.

One might assume, in reading a Holocaust memoir, that there's always some hope to cling to, as in a violent Hollywood action film where we know the action hero will always make it out of his or her predicament--after all, the author survived the camps to write about it afterwards. But, in fact, Holocaust memoirs leave the reader feeling certain of the fact that the author's survival was random, due to forces beyond the survivor's control, and certainly without any particular meaning. In this sense, the film The Pianist follows the exact outlines of a Holocaust memoir.

The story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist, and his escape from the Warsaw ghetto and subsequent attempt to hide from the Germans, is Roman Polanski's long-awaited film on the Polish experience of the Holocaust. The film excels at showing the slow breakdown of a family under the crowded conditions and food shortages of the ghetto and Szpilman's slow wasting during his years of hiding. But Polanski's film falls short in depicting the interior world of Szpilman; it would have been a great film had he shown Szpilman's attempts to cope psychologically with his captivity, with the endless terror and boredom and, when it was over, with the aftermath. Instead, the film is shot in a cool, matter-of-fact style that emphasizes the randomness and cruelty of Nazi violence, but leaves us feeling that we barely know Szpilman.

At the end of the film, Szpilman shows some emotion at meeting an old friend who survived the camps, but then blithely returns to his job playing with a Polish orchestra, as if he were living in happily-ever-after Hollywood land. The film doesn't tell us if Szpilman married and had children, who he married (another survivor, as so many did?), whether he felt guilt over his survival for the rest of his life, became an alcoholic, attempted suicide, dealt with long-term health problems, or carried any scars or effects at all of his ordeal. Certainly, there will always be a place for the straight-forward narrative of what happened during the Holocaust, but in a world that's seen Sophie's Choice, the audience will always expect to see at least some depiction of the survivor's attempt to cope with the aftermath.

Nevertheless, The Pianist is a film worth seeing, and Adrien Brody remains high on my list of favorite actors.--Maria Tomchick