[In the following review, LaSalle observes that the strength of The Pianist lies partly in Polanski's decision to limit the film's perspective to that of one individual, asserting that the film is one of the “great” movies about the Holocaust.]

People have a tendency to adapt, make do and look on the bright side. One of the many terrible, unforgettable things about The Pianist, the harrowing new drama from Roman Polanski, is that it shows how that normally healthy impulse worked to seal the doom for hundreds of thousands of innocent people during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

The Holocaust has been the subject of many films. The Pianist is one of the great ones. Polanski eschews the big canvas of Spielberg's Schindler's List and follows the true story of a single individual and his family from the day the Germans invade Warsaw to the day the Allies liberate it.

We never see more than he sees or know more than he knows (except what we know from history). Polanski's subjective approach takes us gradually into the horror, and the effect is terrifying and also psychologically revealing. We get an idea—just an idea, but an idea—of what it must have been like.

Adrien Brody plays Wladyslaw Szpilman, a classical pianist for Warsaw radio, whose broadcast is interrupted one day in 1939 by an explosion. He goes home to find his siblings and elderly parents contemplating evacuation, now that the Germans are at the gates. But a radio broadcast consoles them. England and France are joining the war. The family decides to tough it out.

In a lesser movie, we'd see the Germans arriving, and in the next scene we'd see desolation, bodies in the streets and people being crammed into boxcars. But The Pianist shows how this was a two-year process. At first Jews weren't allowed in public parks. Then they weren't allowed to keep more than a small sum of money in their homes. In one scene, Szpilman's father reads incredulously that all Jews will be required to wear star-of-David armbands—their exact color and dimension are described with typical German meticulousness. What we know to be the beginning of the end, the characters regard as a mind-boggling absurdity.

It's a dehumanizing process, and we see the effect on Szpilman, who, as played by Brody, starts the film with the bearing and confidence of a young man whose talent has paved the way to a golden future. Gradually, doubt creeps into his eyes, and then terror, and then blind animal panic. His performance is so true that we don't even notice it as a performance. It's as if he were a character in a documentary.

There are scenes in The Pianist, some based on Szpilman's wartime experience and others from Polanski's own recollections, that will make audiences despair of humanity. With a jovial sadism, a German soldier makes old Jews dance by the ghetto gate. In another scene the Szpilman family watches as their neighbor across the street, an old man in a wheelchair, is thrown out of a window. Unlike Spielberg, Polanski doesn't press for emotion in these scenes but presents all with cool detachment. It's a different artistic road that leads to the same moving effect.

In the meantime, the audience can keep its head. We watch the atrocities mount and marvel at how, despite the horrors, life keeps defaulting into stasis, routine, the illusion of normality. There are work permits to be obtained, meals to be made. So that even when the dead bodies of children are in the street, and people are being stripped of everything and carted off to death camps, a Polish Jew can say, “The Germans will never squander such a large workforce”—and we understand how he'd believe it.

The Pianist is the product of an extremely knowing cinematic mind. As Szpilman goes from one hiding place to another, much of the action is seen from his perspective, as he looks out a window. Polanski resists the temptation ever to move in for a close-up of what Szpilman is looking at. In one scene, a bomb explodes nearby, and on the soundtrack we hear a high-pitched whistling that simulates what Szpilman is hearing. Polanski puts us into Szpilman's room, then puts us into his head. It's a nerve-shattering experience.

The Pianist contains moments of irony, of ambiguity and of strange beauty, as when we finally get a look at Warsaw and see a panorama of destruction, a world of color bombed into black-and-white devastation. We encounter good Poles and bad Poles, brave Jews and opportunistic Jews, and easily the film's most arrestingly enigmatic performance is that of Thomas Kretschmann, who plays a German captain.

In the course of showing us a struggle for survival, in all its animal simplicity, Polanski also gives us humanity, in all its complexity.