Roman Polanski came home from the Cannes film festival with a Palme d’Or for The Pianist. Was it because the movie is a great masterpiece, or was it because Polanski is a senior director, who has now made a film about the Holocaust, which he himself narrowly escaped at an early age? The subject matter is undoubtedly important, and it is notoriously hard to deal with. The repercussions of the murder of six million of Europe’s Jews still echo through world politics; emotions still run very high. That Polanski was able to turn his gaze to that horror and make a movie without much of an ideological bent is remarkable. The focus is on human suffering, in particular that of Polish pianist Wladimir Szpilman. But that is also, in my view, the problem with The Pianist. The suffering is so relentless that after a while I just went numb. Which is not to trivialise the fact that people suffered, just to say that perhaps one can’t process more than a certain amount of it at any one time. And the degree of brutality meted out by the Nazis is still incomprehensible. Even when we know the facts, as with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process in South Africa, for instance, the mystery remains: how could people do this to one another?The Pianist can only face the facts; it can’t solve the mystery. Maybe no one can, but for a movie it means there is no revelation or resolution to move towards — there is only survival. If the idea was to show how the Holocaust reduced even the most sophisticated and artistic of people to near-animal status, concerned only with survival on the most fundamental level, The Pianist succeeds. In the early part of the film, as the horror of the war is gathering, we see Szpilman in the context of his family (and a meticulously recreated Warsaw). This is a loving and moving portrait of a doomed group of people. Once Szpilman is on his own, though, and the struggle to survive is boiled down to its most basic terms, it is a matter of gritting one’s teeth until it’s over.Which seems the extent of the sympathy one can feel for Szpilman. Adrien Brody plays him beautifully, with an aristocratic grace that never quite leaves his features, even when they have been stripped down by starvation. But it’s hard to know what is going on in his head, which would be the condition for real empathy. Everything that happens to Szpilman is imposed on him from outside. He is a cipher, an enigmatic symbol of survival itself. We get a glimpse of his inner life when, hiding in some bombed-out place, he plays an imaginary piano to himself. But we have little sense of what role that music or the memory of it, or his concept of himself as an artist, played in his survival — if any. Perhaps his survival was just luck, an accident of history.
Almost as dreary as The Pianist, though on a completely different level, is the story of another musician: 8 Mile is rap star Eminem’s debut as a movie actor. Perhaps I was put off by the “presentation” that preceded the screening — a gaggle of young South African rappers had been dragooned (and, I’m sure, paid) to sing or chant the praises of freedom of expression. You are “free to speak”, they rapped, “free to follow your destiny”. Except that this was in fact a marketing exercise for a cellphone company, which is trying to penetrate the “youth market” via the movie. You are certainly free to speak — as long as you pay your cellphone bills.The movie itself is a credible and creditable vehicle for Eminem. Surprisingly gritty, it portrays him as a trailer-park boy finding purpose and a means of self-expression in rapping contests. White as he is, he goes up against his darker brothers and achieves some sort of victory. Or is it that he finds authenticity? This against a tormented home background; Kim Basinger slums it as his trashy mom. I imagine that 8 Mile will work for some and not for others, and it will depend on how you feel about the music. Responses to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark varied according to how viewers felt about Björk and her music, used extensively in that odd musical. As for 8 Mile, I freely admit that rap doesn’t do much for me, which is probably why the movie didn’t take me all the way. That aside, it tells a watchable story, and Eminem (whose face is more capable than expected of registering sensitivity) is a worthy actor. Amid all that self-regarding angst and that gloomily shot grit, however, I did begin to long for a bit of frivolous glitter.