“THE PIANIST”: Saw this movie with Russo on Saturday. It’s based on the autobiography of a Jewish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, who spent WWII in Warsaw. There’s a lot to recommend this movie, and if you were considering it, I do think you should go. It is truly affecting, and not just because all Holocaust movies are powerful. There are three things, I think, that differentiated “The Pianist” from other Holocaust movies (and yes, I am treating that as a genre, for a reason I’ll talk about in a moment): Roman Polanski’s direction; thus, the music and sets (especially the ruins); and the constant emphasis on Szpilman’s identity as a pianist. Some of the most powerful scenes show Szpilman either playing the piano, or playing a kind of ghost-piano, his fingers dancing on empty air. That aspect of the movie got at the ways people try to build a sense of self (there’s a very subtly handled clash between Szpilman’s self-identification as essentially a pianist and the Nazis’ identification of him as essentially a Jew); it also underlined how cultured, how soaked in art and music and literature, both the German and Polish people were.

I was somewhat disappointed only because I wanted a deeper sense of Szpilman’s character–the movie tries so hard to make “pianist” the center of his identity that when he goes into hiding it’s as if he stops being an individual, he stops having an identity, which would be more powerful if we had a sense of what’s being erased here–what was he, before the war, underneath his musical talent? The movie is too much about what happens to him and too little about how those events change him or reveal him to himself. I think it is trying to be a movie about Szpilman but ends up being a Holocaust movie, if you see what I mean.